BQR IN THE 
HANGING WORLD 



R.M.MacIVER 




Class __HlL*££i 
Book Mz, 

CopyiiL'iii N? 



COHVKIGHT DEPOStr. 



LABOR IN THE 
CHANGING WORLD 



BY 

R. M. MacIVER 




NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

TORONTO 

J. M. DENT & SONS 



Copyright, 19 19 
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



All Rights Reserved 



Printed In the United States of America 

OCI 

c< 



PREFACE 

Now that the conflict of nations is ended, let 
us hope forever, another conflict, the abiding and 
paramount issue between labor and capital, takes 
the center of the stage. What is that issue? 
Whither is it driving us? What way of deliver- 
ance is possible from the grievous disturbances 
and monstrous evils which it reveals ? These ques- 
tions I have sought to discuss and if possible to 
answer in this little book. 

I have limited myself to the central question, the 
place of labor in the industrial system. The real 
issue lies beyond the recriminations in which both 
sides indulge. It is of course natural that the 
workers should insist on the exploiting selfishness 
of employers in general, and that employers 
should charge the workers in general with slack- 
ness and irresponsibility. Each party can bring 
evidence to support its indictment. But what is 
the conclusion? That workers, in the situation of 
employers, would be less grasping? Or that em- 
ployers would be more industrious and "loyal" if 



vi PREFACE 

put in the place of working men? Of course not. 
And if not, although the aforementioned evidence 
is symptomatic, the recrimination, the ethical con- 
demnation, is vain. For it is the difference in 
situation that evokes the difference in character. 
It is due to the unlike fate of like-motived human 
beings within the economic system. The system, 
with its assignment of power and lack of power, of 
opportunity and lack of opportunity, the system 
with its evocation of the tempers and attitudes 
akin to the necessities which it imposes — the sys- 
tem alone is impeached. 

Every great social division divides also, at just 
this point, the thoughts of men. For it raises this 
fundamental question: Shall we impute the re- 
sponsibility to human nature primarily, assuming 
that the system, or lack of system, within which 
the division falls, is on the whole consequence and 
not cause; or have we ground for the belief that a 
practicable change of system would mitigate, if 
not heal, the division? The conservative answers, 
"You must first change human nature," assuming 
also, as a rule, that this is not practicable, perhaps 
not desirable. The advocate of reform answers 
that a change of system can, without changing 



PREFACE vii 

human nature at all, reveal a change of heart. 
Most obviously this question is raised to-day in 
respect of the disastrous international divisions of 
the civilized world; and according as men in gen- 
eral are led to accept one or the other of these 
alternatives, the whole future of the world will 
turn this way or that. 

And surely no less may be said of this other 
great cause of offense, the economic division 
summed up in the words "labor" and "capital." 
Have we any basis here for the more optimistic 
view that a change of system can precede and 
evoke a change of heart — or, more precisely, for 
that is all our argument requires, an effective 
change of mood? 

Patchwork will certainly not avail, and I have 
therefore laid no stress on the half-hearted and 
sometimes deceptive devices that pass under the 
names of profit-sharing and "co-partnership," nor 
yet on those conciliation schemes which, however 
useful in their own place, are calculated to bolster 
up the existent order. On the other hand, the suc- 
cess of such experiments as have seriously at- 
tempted to organize production to serve the com- 
mon interest of the producers encourages the hope 



via PREFACE 

that a real program of industrial reconstruction is 
not only necessary but feasible. 

But, apart from such experiments, there are cer- 
tain general considerations which may here be 
advanced. It is in the first place necessary to 
regard the industrial system as an evolution with- 
out fixity or finality, and assuredly dependent at 
any time on the motives of its half-creators and 
half-slaves — for it is true of every institution that 
it both springs from and dominates the wills of 
men. When the will of a large class within the 
system changes — and I try to show in what fol- 
lows that it has been changing rapidly — the system 
itself either changes or breaks. It breaks if the 
dominant minority-will is so obdurate as to induce 
a counter spirit of dominance on the opposite side. 
Then we have Bolshevism, the seed of which is 
always sown and nurtured by its bitterest foes. 

On the other hand no open-minded observer, 
certainly no educator, can fail to be struck with 
the wonderful way in which men normally respond 
to the institutional systems within which they 
grow. There is a most significant contrast be- 
tween the enduring, and often too rigid, frame- 
work of institution and custom on the one hand 



PREFACE 



IX 



and on the other the responsive spirit of each 
fresh generation before it in turn takes on the cast 
of time. Change the system, and beyond doubt 
you change also the thoughts of men. Wherever 
it is practicable to remold the system to express 
a new ideal, it is certain that you thereby perpetu- 
ate that ideal. Now a world-earthquake has shak- 
en the social system, including also the economic 
order. The forces allied to the old order are al- 
ready at work to restore and to confirm it. Those 
who believe in a new order must seize the perhaps 
brief time of opportunity. They must proclaim 
alike an ideal and a practicable way of its attain- 
ment. 

The root of industrial evil is the present wage- 
system. The ideal towards which we must strive 
is some more cooperative order of production 
within which there at length remains, as we now 
understand these terms, neither "capitalism" nor 
"wagery," neither wanton upliftedness nor haz- 
ardous dependence, neither prodigal waste nor 
sheer degrading poverty. Thus roughly stated, 
the ideal doubtless suggests revolution. All ideals 
do, or else they remain forever ideals. But revo- 
lution as a result and not a means, revolution as 



x PREFACE 

the significance of a new order duly established by 
intelligent process, not the blind catastrophe of 
despair. Perhaps fate offers us finally the choice 
between these two. 

There is a temper of revolution which is but 
the other side of the seal of tyranny. From such 
no new order can arise, only a grotesque reversal 
of established dominance. There is also a tem- 
per of revolution which, with no less prophetic 
a vision of the end to be attained, would yet build 
in patient determination, rejecting no stone that 
may be fitted into the new edifice. From such 
alone can a new order proceed. 

What is to be feared for America is that the 
apathy of the majority and the narrow domina- 
tion of a plutocracy owning unprecedented power 
may, while repressing the constructive spirit, pro- 
voke yet further in the subject ranks of labor the 
spirit of anarchy and overthrow. This would be 
countered by an increasing conservatism in the 
rest of the community, including the superior 
ranks of labor. Thus America, which already, 
for all its magnificent opportunities, is laggard in 
the movement of industrial progress, may prove 
that nowhere is it so hard to change an old order 
as in a new world. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface v 

I. The Economic Foundations and the 

Shaken Superstructure .... i 

II. The Changing Attitude of Labor . 27 

III. The Modern Claims of Labor . . 39 

IV. The Widening of the Idea of Labor . 64 

V. The Waste of the Present Industrial 

System 77 

VI. The Crisis 93 

VII. Industrial Reconstruction in Great 

Britain: Plans and Proposals . . 104 

VIII. Lions in the Path 133 

IX. The New World and the Old: A Con- 
trast in Labor Conditions . . . 156 

X. Reconstruction and the Trade Union 168 

XL Labor, Immigration, and the Birth- 
rate 183 

XII. The Labor of Women 197 

XIII. The Day of Big Things • . . . 210 

XIV. Some Practical Conclusions . . . 226 



LABOR IN THE 
CHANGING WORLD 



CHAPTER I 

THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS AND THE SHAKEN 
SUPERSTRUCTURE 

The assault of new ideas. The position of the 
State: the new limits to its sovereign power. 
The transformation of the economic order. 
The significance of "labor unrest! } 

The foundation of economic order in the in- 
creasing necessity of cooperative production. 
Importance in this connection of the growth 
of productivity as compared with population. 
The alternative channels of the energy and 
resources so liberated. 



It is the law of nature, for nations and for 
men, that they pass through the crumbling stages 
of past life to new experiences. These they must 
receive or they inevitably decay. There are 



2 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

periods of secretion and gestation and also of 
travail and birth; periods of quiescence and also 
of struggle; periods of slow growth and also of 
violent transition. It is our fortune to live in 
the disturbing days of great changes, fulfilled and 
impending, in a time of national travail and of 
new deliverance. The war, it is said, has shaken 
society to its foundations, — to its foundations, yes, 
but the foundations themselves remain. The su- 
perstructure is shaken, but the foundations are 
in the heart of humanity; and, while that endures, 
while men hunger and thirst, while they love and 
fear, while their wants and strivings can be satis- 
fied only by obedience to the abiding laws both 
of their own nature and of the outer world, the 
bases of society endure. 

I am not advocating the hoary fallacy that hu- 
man nature does not change. Man changes all 
things else upon the earth because he changes 
himself first. He builds new worlds because he 
is himself different. He widens the bounds of 
society because his own mind is widened. He 
masters the forces of nature because his own in* 
telligent force has grown. But, though social 
forms and institutions pass away, the ties which 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 3 

bind men in society are not thereby broken. Men 
remain dependent upon one another; rather, they 
grow more dependent on one another. The com- 
mon welfare grows more, not less, real; more, not 
less, insistent. The foundations of society can 
never fail while the truth stands that the essential 
needs of men are best or alone fulfilled in the mu- 
tuality and cooperation. 

The foundations remain, but the superstructure 
of institution is badly shaken. There is scarcely 
a social institution that the storm of war has left 
wholly unscathed. Some will soon be repaired, 
but others must be rebuilt. These last, though 
bulwarked by custom, had been weakened by the 
continued assault of new ideas, by the growing 
urgency of conscious needs seeking a satisfaction 
these failed to give. The war broke the seals of 
custom and thereby gave potency to the attacking 
forces. 

For in these days of history-making it is well 
to remind ourselves that the only thing that does 
make history is a change in men's ideas. Finally, 
it is not wars or conquests, not King or Emperor 
or President, it is the ideas which they represent 
or incarnate, the ideas which they stimulate or 



4 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

repress, that change the face of the world. Actions 
fade into memories, but ideas live as long as there 
is a brain to think them. Over them alone time 
has no sway, but it is they that give time its mean- 
ing. We divide them into epochs because of 
the changing thoughts of men. Actions are cir- 
cumscribed by the hour and the place. Ideas are 
winged and seek all over the earth for the re- 
ceptive soil; just as the germ mysteriously appears 
where its appropriate breeding place is prepared, 
so wherever the spiritual soil is favorable the idea 
finds its way. It waits patiently for the hour 
and the place that it may strike root, and there 
it grows and fructifies and can be extruded only 
by the presence of another and more potent idea. 
An old Scottish theologian used to speak of the 
"expulsive power of a new affection." The 
phrase may be applied to ideas. No force, no 
medicine, nothing but the expulsive power of a 
new idea can drive out that vital germ from the 
mind of man. 

The war confounded the general sense of se- 
curity which exists in an ordered society, disturbed 
that complacency which the more fortunate wrap 
around them as a garment, and still more com- 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 5 

pletely dissipated that spirit of acquiescence which 
the less fortunate acquire as part of their ad- 
justment to life's conditions. The ferment of 
ideas is more advanced in the older lands, but it 
inevitably spreads, as do most socio-economic 
movements, from east to west. It is well, there- 
fore, that we should ask ourselves, with special 
reference to the labor situation, just what has 
been shaken and what remains as solid rock. 

First, the position and power of the State itself 
has been subject to the assault of new question- 
ings. Never in history has the State been so 
supreme, so absolute, as it became under the ne- 
cessity of war. Never did it enter so intimately 
and so irresistibly into the life of every individ- 
ual, assigning to millions the issues of life and of 
death, prescribing what men shall work at, what 
they shall eat, what they shall wear, even what 
they shall think. In earlier times the theory of 
absolutism went further, but it required the mod- 
ern centralized mechanism of production, it re- 
quired the modern press, it required the network 
of railway, telegraph and telephone, to arm the 
central political authority with swift and univer- 
sal dominion over the lives of men. And yet 



6 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

underneath there were forces at work which were 
preparing to challenge as never before the old 
principle of State-sovereignty. While the menace 
of autocracy was being thrust down, democracy 
itself in its historic significance was insecure and 
full of doubt. The struggle for democracy had 
been, historically, a struggle for the liberty of 
representative parliaments. The struggle seemed 
over, the liberty achieved, and men felt a curi- 
ous dissatisfaction with the result. Consider the 
mother of parliaments herself. It was only in 
191 1 (when the veto of the Lords was broken) 
that the last stage of its emancipation was com- 
plete, the end of an age-long struggle. And yet 
when the war was over and the time came to 
elect a parliament that, constitutionally, must de- 
cide the most fateful questions ever submitted 
to any body of men, most observers recorded 
an unwonted indifference on the part of the elec- 
torate. Many felt that it was not there, or by 
these representatives, that the fate of the world 
would be decided. Within the nation there had 
grown up other powers, great new associations 
that the political sovereign had perforce to recog- 
nize. With the most formidable of these powers, 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 7 

the opposing forces of capital and of labor, the 
English parliament, all-powerful in name, omni- 
competent by constitution, has been compelled to 
treat, as one power with others, ostensibly acting 
as mediator, but doing so not of choice but of 
necessity. The State is no longer Leviathan, su- 
preme and alone. It is one collectivity among 
others. It finds new and strange limits to its 
power. 

In the international situation another change 
of the political structure is being prepared. Fed- 
eration of peoples, which nearly all men regard as 
desirable in some form, cannot be attained without 
a surrender of a part of the old sovereignty of the 
individual state. Besides the national parliament 
there may arise the international parliament. It is 
well to recognize that this would profoundly affect 
the currents of national life, that it would mean 
the stimulation of new ideas, that it would mean in 
particular a further and progressive revision of 
the idea of political sovereignty. It would create 
new problems for democracy, showing that the 
mere achievement of full parliamentary institu- 
tions, far from being the final solution of the prob- 



8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

lem of liberty and order, was but the first step on 
a long journey of peril and of hope. 

Enough may have been said to explain the 
statement that the political structure has been 
shaken by the power of new ideas. Much that 
once seemed sure has grown uncertain, much that 
once men accepted as cardinal political principle 
is questioned. Those who look for finality in 
human institutions must journey elsewhere on their 
fruitless quest. I turn next to the economic struc- 
ture, the true storm-center of the struggle. 

The present economic system is often described 
as a competitive one. The description has long 
ceased to be accurate, if it ever was. In reality 
the present system is the unstable resultant of two 
opposing sets of forces, the competitive and the 
anti-competitive, and the latter has been gaining 
ground at the expense of the former. This is 
revealed very markedly in three ways : in the grow- 
ing control of the state over economic conditions, 
ranging from actual ownership to such legal de- 
terminations as Factory Acts ensure; secondly, 
in the vast modern organization of capital, by 
means of amalgamations, trusts, cartels, selling 
agreements, interlocking directorates, associations 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 9 

of manufacturers, associations of agricultural pro- 
ducers, alliance of banks with trust companies and 
industrial corporations, and so forth; and, thirdly, 
in the extension of unionism among the workers. 
The semi-automatism of the competitive system 
is being in part superseded by the conscious ef- 
fort of these three great forces to gain or retain 
control of the productive process, and, perhaps 
still more, by the struggle between the two latter, 
capital and labor, to obtain the greater share of 
the product and in the effort to use the machinery 
of the state. 

While these mighty contests are straining the 
whole industrial fabric, the strife is gradually 
concentrating around the wage-system. Here is 
the real significance of what we call labor unrest. 
As it grows self-conscious it proves to be nothing 
less than an ever more resolute attack upon a sys- 
tem. We shall go far astray if we think that 
praise or condemnation, of either side, has any 
relevance to the situation. The worker, if he 
changed places with the employer, would be over- 
persuaded by the system even as the employer is; 
the employer, if he changed places with the work- 
er, would likewise learn the bitterness and inertia 



io LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

of wage-earning. Employers and workers alike 
are bound up in a system which neither has created, 
but naturally the attack comes from the side which 
suffers from it most. Labor unrest witnesses 
to a deep-rooted evil. It springs from poverty, 
hazard and privation, but still more from the 
sense of exploitation and the frustration of op- 
portunity — for all of which it accuses the wage- 
system. Labor unrest is not something to be ex- 
orcised, it is not even something to be feared. 
It is part of what distinguishes the human being 
from the sheep. It is inevitable in a civilization 
which leaves from twenty to forty per cent of 
the industrial population in a state of sheer desti- 
tution, and which concentrates, as in Great 
Britain, two-thirds of the total wealth of the coun- 
try in the hands of one-seventieth of its popu- 
lation, or, as in America, the same proportion in 
the hands of one-fiftieth of the population. It 
is part of the eternal striving of humanity for 
a better and fuller life, fraught no doubt with all 
the difficulty and aberration, but also with all the 
necessity which accompanies every process of 
growth. The unrest of to-day makes the civiliza- 
tion of to-morrow. Had there been no unrest in 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS u 

the stone age, the world would be still in the stone 
age. 

It is our duty to understand this momentous 
uprising, to examine it with clear and fearless 
eyes, to search beyond symptoms for causes. Let 
us not think of it as a mere troubler of the peace. 
It exists because there is no peace. Let us not 
dismiss it as agitation, as disturbance of the es- 
tablished order. It exists because there is deep- 
seated disorder. We should no more meet it with 
reproval and indictment than a physician re- 
proaches or indicts a disease. We should no 
more seek to remove it by vain palliatives or 
vainer incantations than a physician seeks thus to 
remove the causes of disease. If those of us who 
are not in the ranks of labor do not go out with 
sympathy and understanding to apprehend the 
human meaning of these discontents, we are but 
helping to give them narrower, more bitter, and 
more explosive character. Blindness is always 
the counterpart of revolution. 

A great new consciousness of need has arisen 
within the present system of industry. It is in 
part the product of education, and in part the 
product of machinery. For education, the educa- 



12 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

tlon fostered by experience rather than by the 
schools, has brought a greater consciousness at 
once of dignity, of power, and of possibility. It 
teaches men to refuse the position of being a 
commodity, to be bought and sold without regard 
for the human costs of the buying and selling. 
When once that degradation becomes conscious, 
it ceases to be long tolerable, and the days of any 
system which makes it necessary are numbered. 
Machinery was in a measure the means of that 
degradation. Machinery massed men and deper- 
sonalized their work. It destroyed the old crafts- 
manship — the intimate relation of the worker to 
the integral product of his hands. Machinery is 
man's great agent of deliverance from the drudg- 
ery of life, but it offers deliverance at a price. 
The price is the loss of the specialized skill known 
as craftsmanship. Machinery breaks down the 
barriers between crafts. It does not destroy skill 
but it generalizes it. It specializes function and 
generalizes skill. It has destroyed the mystery, 
the exclusiveness, and the privilege of the old 
crafts. No longer can the workman find in his 
specialized function the living interest which a 
men seeks in his work. He must now gain less 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 13 

narrow interests, even as his skill is less narrow. 
He must share in the interest of the whole process 
of production of which his work is a fragment. 
He must consciously cooperate in production, as 
one who is a partner in production. The absence 
of this spirit of cooperation is the final indictment 
of the present breaking system, and there will be 
no peace until that spirit is regained. Ask almost 
any employer, and he will tell you that the work- 
men have no interest in their work. Lord Lever- 
hulme, for example, declares that the present sys- 
tem turns the workers into a race of ca'canny 
shirkers and slackers. What can you expect? 
Has it not always been true that the hireling flees 
because he is a hireling? 

The loss is twofold, in the effect upon charac- 
ter and in the effect upon productivity. When 
men lose interest in their work they lose the sense 
of responsibility. Much of the energy of life is 
lost, and much is misdirected. The demand for 
mere excitement witnesses to the loss of a more 
central interest. Because men fail to find interest 
in their work they pursue the spurious excitations 
of sensationalism, to the provision of which all 
social institutions, but especially the press, the pic- 



14 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

ture house, and the pulpit, may be perverted. 
The balked intrinsic desire, the natural desire 
of men to fulfill themselves in their work, issues 
in a restless craving for extrinsic and unsatisfy- 
ing stimulation. On the other hand, there is the 
direct economic loss. Is it not a curious com- 
mentary on our economic order that the great 
mass of those who produce should take pains to 
lower their own productivity? While in all other 
things men seek to be efficient, here they seek not 
uncommonly to be inefficient. The sense of op- 
posing interests means, here as elsewhere, ineffi- 
ciency; the sense of a common cause alone brings 
cooperation, and therefore efficiency. But in in- 
dustry in general there is cleavage, not coopera- 
tion, and therefore inefficiency. The general con- 
clusion is clear. A way of cooperation, of partner- 
ship, must be found which will unite all producers 
in the work of production, making it the common 
interest of them all, so that men cease to feel as the 
helots and hirelings of their fellowmen. All sig- 
nificant schemes of industrial reconstruction, such 
as that of the Whitley Committee in Great Britain, 
are directed to the attainment of this end. They 
recognize the necessity for a new order, a more 






THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 15 

representative order, a more cooperative order. 
This cannot be attained without changes of great 
importance in the economic superstructure of so- 
ciety. 

II 

The economic foundations are secure. Every 
advance of society, every discovery, every appli- 
cation of science, make the foundations more se- 
cure. For they make men more dependent upon 
one another over greater areas of community. 
Already not one of us but employs unwittingly 
the hands and brains of countless thousands of 
his fellowmen. Carlyle prophetically saw it when 
he declared that not an Indian could quarrel with 
his squaw but the world must smart for it — the 
price of beaver would rise! That hyperbole 
grows in fact more true with every advance of 
science, for science destroys isolation and estab- 
lishes interdependence. The history of man is in 
one aspect the history of the growth of an or- 
ganization which diversifies the work of each, 
making each more dependent on others in order 
that by the surrender of self-sufficiency he may re- 
ceive back a thousandfold in fullness of life. It is 



16 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

becoming true between nations as between men. 
The world knows to-day that a nation cannot in- 
jure another without doing grave injury to itself. 
What it has yet to learn is the happier counter- 
part of that truth, that a nation cannot serve itself, 
cannot honestly prosper, without benefiting other 
nations also. 

Cooperation is more fruitful than conflict. 
Man works to satisfy his need, and seeks to do 
so in the most economical way. He therefore 
chooses more and more the method of coopera- 
tion. Economy and society go hand in hand. 
Where there is no society there is waste. Where 
there is social dissension there is waste. The great- 
est waste in the modern world, from the economic 
standpoint, exceeding even the waste of the war- 
fare between nations, is that of the warfare be- 
tween Labor and Capital. If that seems a hard 
saying, it is because we have not realized the ex- 
traordinary wastefulness of industrial disharmony 
— the waste of unemployment, the waste of labor 
turnover, above all the waste of unwilling task 
work. This warfare will never be ended, it will al- 
most certainly grow worse, until labor ceases to be 
mere labor and capital to be mere capital. This 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 17 

means equality of opportunity, so that neither 
status nor accumulated wealth, but natural endow- 
ment and quality shall determine leadership in in- 
dustry. It means security against exploitation, so 
that none shall grow rich out of the poverty of oth- 
ers. It means assurance of employment, so that 
none who have the will and capacity to work shall 
seek for it in vain. It means a more representative 
system of industry, so that all who share in its 
toil shall have the right to express their needs 
through an orderly constitution. It means indus- 
trial citizenship, so that no class shall be without 
a voice in the determination of its fate. Let us 
clearly understand that the alternative to these 
conditions is no longer, in the present temper of 
our civilization, the retention of the present sys- 
tem — it is the ferment of revolution, and revolu- 
tion can gain, by whatever violence and disturb- 
ance, no other ends than these. It may attempt 
more, but it cannot obtain more. Any economic 
order whatever must rest on the economic founda- 
tions of society. Men must finally adopt the sys- 
tem which is in the widest sense most economical, 
the system which, with the least expenditure, pro- 
duces most of what men require to satisfy their. 



1 8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

needs. Neither the selfishness of the few nor the 
tyranny of the many can long defeat the lesson 
of experience. Because cooperation is in the 
long run most economical, men must in the long 
run resort to cooperation. They must, whether 
they desire it or not, obtain their individual ends 
through economic solidarity. 

There was only one lion in the path which 
could have made this progress impossible. The 
most formidable question, within the economic 
sphere, which any man has ever asked, was that 
raised by Malthus. Malthus raised the question 
of productivity versus population. He held that 
there was a constant tendency for population to 
outrun productivity. The increase of mankind 
was naturally more rapid than the increase of the 
means of life. If this were true, then men must 
always be subject, in the absence of a prudential 
control which Malthus thought desirable but rare, 
to endless conflict, and the economy of coopera- 
tion could never be established. But the period 
that has elapsed since the works of Malthus first 
disturbed the optimism of the early nineteenth 
century has witnessed developments which have 
removed that terror and implanted, in the more 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 19 

fearful-minded, another of a very different kind. 
Falling birth-rate and falling death-rate, in all 
civilized countries, witness to profound changes 
in the social order. Into the significance of these 
changes we cannot here enter. It must suffice to 
state the conclusion, which many facts and figures 
could be brought forward to substantiate, that 
there is now every reason to believe that pro- 
ductivity is advancing more rapidly than popula- 
tion. The period of war was a sad exception and 
yet the unheard-of economic waste of that period, 
while yet the general standard of living suffered 
comparatively little, furnished a remarkable proof 
of the general truth. In all civilized communities 
there is created in every normal year a surplus 
of production over consumption, a surplus which, 
as increased capital, can be made to enhance con- 
tinually the general standard of economic pros- 
perity. 

This is a fact of immense significance. It opens 
up a prospect full of hope. It points to a time, 
in the quite near future, when a recognized mini- 
mum of material comfort shall eliminate the sor- 
did destitution in which multitudes are living to- 
day. The philosopher Godwin held the view 



20 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

that in the truly scientific age half an hour's work 
a day would suffice for the satisfaction of ma- 
terial needs. We may think such a statement 
absurd and Utopian, but it is worth while reflect- 
ing that probably some such minute fraction of 
modern industrial activity is in many directions as 
productive as the whole weary day of work which 
our ancestors of not many generations back en- 
dured. The spindles of Lancashire to-day pro- 
duce as much as would have required the services 
of two hundred million men unaided by machin- 
ery. Of course needs grow with the power of 
satisfying them. Need is the hydra which when- 
ever one head is cut away grows two new ones 
in its place. If it were not so, there would be in 
the world to-day no poverty and little wealth. 

Let me dwell for a little on this hydra charac- 
ter of human needs. It has an important applica- 
tion. When an original need is satisfied, two 
new possibilities of satisfaction are revealed. 
When, for instance, men have provided for their 
need of food their former desire may go out to- 
wards a finer diet, not more food but different, or 
it may be diverted into some different channel al- 
together. When all the primary organic needs of 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 21 

men are satisfied, men may either refine on these, 
seeking their more luxurious fulfillment, or they 
may pass to the satisfaction of what we may call 
higher needs, cultural needs. Usually, of course, 
both directions are pursued together, and the 
character of a civilization is defined by the de- 
gree of stress it lays upon one or the other, Capua 
went one way and Jerusalem another; Florence 
went one way and New York another. In every 
case the foundation is the economic one, the satis- 
faction of the primary needs. In Aristotelian 
terms, there must be life before there can be the 
good life — or the luxurious life. Man is econo- 
mist before he is either stoic or epicurean. Hence, 
man's increasing productivity, his increasing con- 
trol over the material environment, opens out two 
great avenues of life. Being liberated from the 
pressure of organic necessities, he may be carried 
by the very momentum of the previous effort to 
satisfy these into the ever more intensive pur- 
suit of their endless varieties of refinement. If 
he follows that way, and that alone, his liberation 
is illusory. As the power of satisfaction grows, 
custom and habit turn into necessity what was 
formerly otiosity. The pressure of necessity is 



22 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

restored, with the difference that a hundred ne- 
cessities have taken the place of a few. I do not 
mean to imply that the refinement of organic 
needs is not itself a process of great cultural sig- 
nificance, but only that the complete engrossment 
in these prevents that greater liberation of the 
spirit which the enjoyment of intrinsic interests 
can bestow. This is the other great avenue which 
man's economic mastery prepares. Here is the 
greater emancipation, in the spirit of free devotion 
to ends in themselves worth while, in the pride not 
of possession but of the quality of life, in the 
satisfaction of workmanship and art, in the under- 
standing of men and in the appreciation of na- 
ture, in the sense of fruition through the exercise 
of all man's faculties. These are the treasures 
laid up in heaven which thieves never break 
through to steal, for taking does not impoverish 
nor does withholding enrich. This is the living 
bread which can be distributed among the multi- 
tudes and grows the more it is divided. 

These intrinsic satisfactions are in part the 
alternative to, in part the complement of, the 
former. They are different modes of seeking 
what all men seek as naturally as the plant the 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 23 

light — the sense and reality, the thrill, of living. 
One mode is extrinsic, because it is shallow and 
impermanent and rests on comparison and con- 
trast; the other is intrinsic, because it is deep and 
permanent and satisfies in the direct relation of 
subject to object. In our civilization this latter 
avenue is all too neglected. If only the claim of 
intrinsic interests were more imperative, it would 
restrain the encroaching habituation of further 
extrinsic interests, and thus redirect some of the 
enormous social expenditure of energy which the 
satisfaction of these involves. It would thus in 
time ensure for all men that liberation from en- 
grossment in mere necessity which is the final con- 
dition of the fulfillment of life. 

The civilization of this continent, even more 
than that of Europe, needs to be saved from ab- 
sorption in these extrinsic interests. It was in- 
evitable, in a land of great resources newly opened 
to exploitation, that the extrinsic interests should 
dominate the mind and the temper. It was in- 
evitable that, until the economic foundations were 
fully laid, the cultural interests should be neg- 
lected. But this too exclusive devotion to exter- 
nal ends at last defeats itself. For it creates pov- 



24 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

erty as well as wealth, by an excessive diversion 
of resources to material display. It hinders social 
cooperation and stimulates division. It develops 
one aspect of character at the expense of another, 
and robs life of the finer satisfactions. In the new 
lands, where the appeal of wealth is most insistent, 
there is a development of mere forcefulness at the 
expense of personality. It means finally that 
many who have obtained amply the means to live 
have lost in the scramble the faculty of living. I 
remember a conversation related to me of a New 
York architect who builds elaborate houses for 
wealthy Americans. "Do they get any happiness 
out of them?" he was asked. "No," he replied; 
"it drives them crazy," adding, "and I think it 
will some day drive me crazy too." So the fine 
arts are perverted because men have not learned 
to build on the economic foundations. They have 
not learned the lesson of the intrinsic devotion 
demanded for all permanent satisfaction. The 
stones of civilization have been quarried and cut, 
but no formative soul has built them into its own 
home and abiding monument. Here we have all 
the stones for the great building, a land broad 
and rich in resources, a soil that yields as yet on 



THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 25 

the average but a fraction of its potentiality, a 
people enduring, healthy-minded and clear-willed. 
What is less manifest is the spirit of cooperation 
in communal purposes, the sense of direction to- 
wards a goal, in a word, social education. 

This is true in some sense of our whole modern 
civilization, European as well as American. Nar- 
row, dividing, extrinsic interests, born of engross- 
ment in material aims, have threatened civilization 
itself. They still threaten it, though one great 
peril is past. They threaten it because men still 
believe that the gain of one nation is necessarily 
the loss of another, not understanding how much 
more fruitful, both materially and spiritually, is 
cooperation than conflict. Even the deep sense 
of a sacred international cause, which led multi- 
tudes to death and mutilation in willing but awful 
devotion, has scarcely sufficed to teach that lesson. 
They threaten it too because men still believe 
that within industry the methods of autocracy and 
oligarchy are possible, in a world that has suf- 
fered so much in the name of the opposite cause. 
If recent events have any lesson for us at all, it 
is that the common interest must be widened, and 
that the narrow ambitions of nation or class in 



26 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

these days of interdependence must end in mutual 
disaster. 

This is the spirit in which it is necessary to ap- 
proach the whole problem of labor and its new 
demands. 






CHAPTER II 

THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 

The conflict of interest between labor and capital. 
The new attitude of organized labor as re* 
vealed in the causes of strikes. The danger 
ahead. A new order or else chaos. 

In the flux of all things, of ideas and of sys- 
tems, which the war has hastened rather than 
created, it was not to be supposed that so unstable 
an equilibrium as that of "capital and labor" 
would remain as it was before. On the contrary, 
the situation has changed, rapidly and momen- 
tously. It is of the greatest importance that the 
movement in question should be understood as 
widely as possible. Without understanding, 
tragic errors are inevitable, and the world we live 
in has had enough of these. This matter con- 
cerns us all, whether we employ others or serve 
for hire, and will concern us more closely in the 
near future. My object in these pages is to ex- 
plain the new situation as best I can discern it. 

27 



28 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

Naturally it is full of uncertainties, and there is 
room for much difference of opinion. Such differ- 
ence is welcome and salutary so long as it springs 
from honest attempts to read the situation, so 
long, that is, as we are not content to follow, with- 
out questioning, the guidance of our own immedi- 
ate interests but seek to find, in the light of the 
facts, what is to the interest of the country as a 
whole. 

The change in the situation is due mainly to 
a new attitude on the part of labor. We often 
think of the relation of capital and labor as a 
kind of warfare, and it is part of the truth that 
capital and labor, as at present constituted, are 
ranged against one another as opposing forces. 
Anyone who to-day speaks of the "essential iden- 
tity of interest between capital and labor" is con- 
victed thereby of either simplicity or hypocrisy. 
Is there identity between costs and profits? Is 
not business run for profits, and is not labor a 
cost from that point of view? Does not the 
worker seek to enhance that "cost" by securing 
as high wages as he can? Does not the ordinary 
capitalist seek to minimize it, like other costs, 
by employing the cheapest grade that will serve; 



THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 29 

by getting, through long hours, low wages, and 
intense application, as much out of every unit 
of labor cost as he can; by substituting for it 
machine-power whenever it pays to do so; and in 
general by making for it only such provision as 
brings an economic return — which, be it observed, 
is naturally less in the case of the worker than 
in that of the machine, for new machines involve 
heavy capital expenditure but new workers can be 
procured, seemingly, with no initial outlay? We 
may find modifying principles in the "economy of 
high wages," the superior efficiency of moderately 
short hours, the saving effected by a low percent- 
age of turnover, and so on; but, important as these 
principles are, their limits are obvious. Even if 
they were applicable much further than we have 
any reason to suppose, they would not remove the 
fundamental difference. For how can there be 
identity of interest between two parties one of 
which seeks to diminish what the other seeks to 
augment, to one of which accrues all of the joint 
product that it can withhold from the other? 

Let us be quite clear on this point. There is 
common interest actually in so far as cooperation 
exists, potentially in so far as cooperation is bene- 



30 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

ficial. We say that labor and capital cooperate 
in production, and that both are equally necessary 
to production. Does this mean that the product 
is due to the joint activity of the two, that there 
is actually a division of labor between the two? 
That is clearly too simple a doctrine, for of the 
two parties one merely owns the means whereby 
the other produces. Capital so understood is a 
passivity, not a productive function. Capital may 
be owned by an infant or an idiot or an "estate" 
or any other anonymity. The change of owner- 
ship would make no difference to the productive 
process of such. It would affect the distribution 
of the product, not directly the sum total produced. 
This fact would be obvious were capital properly 
distinguished from management and enterprise, 
which are active functions in production. Capital 
must be owned and must be offered for purposes 
of production, but it need not, so far as production 
in concerned, be owned by anyone in particular. 
So far as production is concerned it might be 
owned by labor or by management, it might be 
owned by the State or the community. That is 
a matter of social expediency or justice, not of 
economic necessity. The socialist position is not 



THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 31 

turned by the argument that capital is as neces- 
sary as labor. The extremest revolutionary can 
still accept that doctrine. 

The cooperation of management and workers 
is something essentially different from that of 
labor and capital, and is necessary to production 
in an entirely different sense. The question of 
the relationship of management and workers 
would be a comparatively simple matter were it 
not that management is usually associated with 
and directly dependent on one only of the two 
parties, worker and capitalist. Were it not for 
that one-sided dependence we could regard man- 
agement and workers as joint producers simply, 
whose relative position and reward depended on 
the comparative rarity of the higher as compared 
with the lower capacity. In this situation there 
would then be no world-shaking problem, but 
just one of the ordinary matters of occupational 
adjustment. 

But as between capitalist and worker the case is 
far more difficult and baffling. Even if we assume 
that both capitalist and worker are essential to 
production does it follow that the common inter- 
est in production suffices as a ground of agree- 



32 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

ment? Men produce in order to possess and to 
consume. With functions so disparate, so in- 
commensurate, so remote from equality in human 
costs, who can assign a principle of "fair" division 
that both parties will accept? Hence, if there is 
a paramount necessity of cooperation, that neces- 
sity, within the present economic order, creates, 
not identity of interest, but the equilibrium of op- 
posing forces. Within the most remarkable sys- 
tem of "cooperative" production the world has 
known, a dangerous and bitter struggle is all the 
time being waged. 

In this struggle, labor must be regarded as the 
offensive, capital as the defensive force. They 
have been organizing for the conflict their re- 
spective sides, but capital has organized to defend 
a position already taken, labor to gain what it 
regards as territory of which it has been despoiled. 
Capital would be glad to make peace on the basis 
of the status quo, labor refuses the status quo. 
Capital upholds the existent order, the prevailing 
law, the established industrial regime. Labor has 
been challenging it, and it is upon that challenge 
that the battle is being joined. 

In recent years the challenge has been grow- 






THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 33 

ing more insistent. It has also been changing its 
form. A century ago labor was fighting for the 
mere right to organize, fighting almost as an out- 
law in society, with government openly on the 
opposing side. A century ago, in Great Britain, 
unions of workers were illegal, and in America 
the common law of conspiracy was a convenient 
engine to condemn the first combinations to raise 
wages. Out of a thousand confusions the issue 
has now emerged clearer and sharper. The 
separation and the consolidation of opposing in- 
terests are more complete. And to-day labor 
feels a new consciousness of power. It has wid- 
ened its claims, its horizon is no longer limited 
to the living wage. It demands a share in pros- 
perity and a voice in the control of industry. 
A study of the causes of strikes reveals a signifi- 
cant change in recent years. In the early days 
nearly all disputes were over questions of wages 
or of hours. It was taken for granted by both 
sides, apart from a few "extremists," that the 
general regulation of the conditions of work was 
a matter which pertained to the employer alone. 
The business was his business, and it was his to 
decide. But the attitude of labor on this point 



34 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

has been changing. For reasons which will be 
mentioned later, this is more manifest in Europe 
than in America. But labor in America is likely, 
as a result of the war, to be more influenced than 
before by the attitude of labor in other countries. 
In any case the trend of industrial evolution is 
inevitably in this direction. In America, too, the 
signs of the times are being displayed to all who 
have eyes to see. For example, the 21st report 
of the U. S. Department of Labor presents an 
analysis of the causes of strikes and lockouts in 
the period 1 881-1905. During that period 43 
per cent of the disputes were due to wages, 5.4 
per cent to hours of work, and 19 per cent to ques- 
tions connected with the recognition of the union. 
But this last cause was growing more important 
all the time, until by 1904 it had become as great 
a source of disturbance as the wage question. 
Similarly, in Canada, an analysis of the Report 
on Strikes and Lockouts, 1 901-16, published by 
the Department of Labor, reveals the fact that in 
disputes concerning wage increases the average 
time-loss through strikes per employe affected was 
19 days, in those concerning hours 24 days, but 
in those concerning union-recognition it was actu- 



THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 35 

ally 75 days. The disputes on this ground were 
therefore, though fewer in number, much more 
bitter. This is very significant. It is also very 
significant that the most difficult "labor troubles" 
which the U. S. Government faced during the 
war, for example, in shipbuilding, were due to 
the demand of the unions, and the resistance to 
that demand, for recognition and a share in con- 
trol. It has been so in Great Britain also, and 
the British Government, as we shall see in a later 
chapter, has been impelled to adopt a plan whose 
uniqueness in the history of industry reveals more 
clearly than anything else the new labor situation. 
If these things happened in the green tree of 
abundant employment at good wages, while the 
great stimulus of patriotism reenforced the ordi- 
nary advantages of industrial harmony, what shall 
be done now in the dry, in the time of transition 
and the loosening of bonds, in the great disturb- 
ance of the readjustment to normal life, when 
men's thoughts are unsettled, and their loyalties 
again confused? In view of the gravity of this 
situation it is ostrich foolishness to talk, as some 
still talk, of the essential unity of the interests of 
capital and labor, and to preach mutual good- 



36 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

will as if that alone would see us through. The 
system of industry must be readjusted to meet 
the need. The system is being attacked; here 
as elsewhere reconstruction is demanded. The 
foundations of common interest must be broad- 
ened before the fair superstructure of goodwill 
can be securely raised. 

The war has destroyed many things ; it has not 
destroyed, but rather nourished, the roots of in- 
dustrial strife. For its material legacy is debt, 
a vast array of claims on future production, which 
will increase the consciousness of power in the 
interest-receiving class and increase the conscious- 
ness of burden in the wage-earning class. (This 
in itself is a potent reason for the cancellation of 
the war-debt, by the most rigorous levies, in as 
short a period as possible.) And there remain, 
not abated but surely intensified, the old deep 
grievances of the sheer poverty that thwarts and 
clogs and stunts so large a portion of the people. 
There is still that insecurity of employment which 
creates in men a haunting dread and a sense of 
alienation, well justified by the bitter compulsory 
demoralization of the out-of-work. There is, 
more than ever, that contrast of wealth flaunting 



THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 37 

its superfluities and poverty stinted of its barest 
needs which impels not only the victim of the 
latter but every honest man to ask, "Is it inevit- 
able, is it just?" 

These things are not new, but the world has 
been changing in other ways. The age of the 
machine has taught its lessons. By making men 
more dependent on one another it made them 
more equal in power — as soon as they realized 
what interdependence meant. By making men 
masters of mechanism it gave them a new sense of 
power, so that they have come to regard authority 
with different eyes, and to question the tradition 
accepted by their fathers. By bringing the ends 
of the earth together, while it has built the paths 
of commerce, it has broken the grooves of cus- 
tom. Capital found undreamed-of resources, but 
labor is finding undreamed-of solidarity. So it 
was before the great war came to shake what re- 
mained of the old sense of stability. 

In such a time it is systems and not men that are 
on trial. The old order changes; if it does not 
yield place to a new order there is chaos. We so 
cling to the old order, we so fear the unsettlement 
of the new, that were the choice possible we would 



38 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

choose to stand still — but the choice is no longer 
possible. The demands of the new situation can- 
not be ignored; they must be faced, in the inter- 
est of the whole. 



CHAPTER III 

THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 

Is labor a commodity f Labor is not, but is often 
treated as a commodity. The heart of the is- 
sue, labor as commodity v. labor as personal- 
ity. The acceptance of the latter view as in- 
volving <( economic democracy." Its meaning 
and necessity. Economic power and political 
power. The place of management in industry. 



We have seen that the attitude of labor has 
been changing, that its leaders demand not simply 
better wages and shorter hours, not simply im- 
proved conditions of work, not merely the protec- 
tion against stress and accident which might be 
given even to machines when they become pre- 
cious enough to their owners — but a new position 
in industry, a new industrial order. What that 
means I must now try to make explicit. 

In a word, labor is demanding release from 

the category of commodities. This is a demand 

of tremendous importance. To understand it we 

39 



4 o LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

must enquire into the meaning of that ambiguous 
word "commodity." A commodity is literally a 
convenience, something whose value lies in the 
service it can render to others, in the use which 
can be extracted from it, in its sole quality as 
economic means. The protest of labor, writes 
the brilliant author of National Guilds, u only be- 
comes reasonable and irresistible when the work- 
ers consciously base their claim upon the funda- 
mental fact that to sell labor as a commodity is 
a degradation; that to reduce the untiring efforts 
of mankind to the level of cotton and coal is a 
crime and sin against the Holy Ghost. ... A 
commodity is something that has exchange value; 
labor is priceless, and, therefore, its value can- 
not be expressed. To give it any parity with cop- 
per or timber is to reduce it to a chattel — in prac- 
tice, though not in form, to chattel slavery." A 
commodity is value-for-others only, a person is a 
value-for-himself. A commodity is something at 
the disposal of others, and thus marketed and 
marketable simply for its emonomic qualities, as 
a machine might be, as a slave — or his labor — 
used to be. It was the fact that his labor was a 
commodity which made the man a slave. 






THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 41 

Now when the question is raised, Is labor a 
commodity or not? the answer in strictness must 
be, labor is not a commodity, but it may be treated 
as such. A man may be worshiped as a god, 
but that does not make him a god. A man may 
be used as a beast of burden, but that does not 
turn him into a beast of burden. Nor is labor 
a commodity because it is in too great measure 
treated as one. To its proper owner, to the 
seller of labor, it never is a commodity, for he 
knows that the manner of its use or disposal, no 
less than the price of it, profoundly affects his 
well-being, his personality, his selfhood and social 
quality. He is under no temptation to "give it 
parity" with copper or timber. Where his labor 
goes he must go too. As it is used, so is he used. 
It is not a separable property which a man may 
sell and think about no more. It is the capacity of 
a person, which can never be summed up in terms 
of economic value. So the wage-earner, as he 
grows conscious of the meaning of labor, does all 
he can to prevent its being treated as a commodity. 

Every Factory Act, every Workmen's Compen- 
sation Act, every Industrial Insurance Act, every 
Minimum Wage Act, records a further step in 



42 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

the social recognition of the truth that labor is 
something else than a commodity. But the logic 
which justifies these has a far wider application. 
The same logic which forbids these obvious sacri- 
fices of producer to product, which forbids that 
the welfare of many shall in that direct way be 
sacrificed to the wealth of few, requires the final 
ordering of the whole system of production to 
secure first the welfare of those who produce. 

The treatment of labor as commodity was one 
of the evils which sprang from the separate em- 
bodiment of capital and labor in two distinct 
classes, as the result of the great industrial pro- 
cess which created modern capital with all its 
dangerous and all its beneficent powers. This 
separation led the buyer of labor to regard it as 
simply one cost in production, to be, like any other 
cost, reduced to the minimum. The drive of the 
competitive system made it impossible for the 
average employer to resist this tendency. It was 
not, and is not, his fault, but the inevitable out- 
come of the system. The resistance, however, 
had to come mainly from the side of labor, and, 
after long suffering from its effects, labor is now 
attacking the system whose remorseless wheels 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 43 

have been one great cause of its woe. It attacks 
the system because it makes labor no more than 
a means to be bought as cheaply as possible, a 
means to be employed, used up, driven, cared for, 
or scrapped according to its productive efficiency; 
because it values the raiment produced above the 
body that produces it, and profits more than per- 
sons. In spite of the ameliorations which mod- 
ern industrial legislation has brought, the com- 
modity-treatment of labor is still too obvious. 

Here in fact is the heart of the present issue, 
Is labor to be treated as a commodity, to be bought 
and sold like any other, subject to the vicissitudes 
of a mere article of trade, even though it is, as 
the old song says, the buying and selling of the 
"lives of men"? Or is labor to grow into an 
effective partner in industry, a citizen and not 
merely a subject within that kingdom? For 
there, we must realize, is the alternative to the 
commodity-position. No mere schemes of con- 
ciliation and arbitration, no superficial devices of 
profit-sharing, no show of patriarchal solicitude 
or philanthropic patronage, will heal this great 
and growing division. Much ingenuity has been 
spent on plans of arbitration and conciliation in 



44 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

industry, private and governmental, compulsory 
or voluntary, with such intermediate forms as the 
Canadian "Lemieux Act"; but they have gener- 
ally disappointed the hopes of their authors. 
The sweep of the conflict has been but little af- 
fected, but little diverted, by these inadequate 
breakwaters. The most ambitious of them, com- 
pulsory arbitration, supported by Government, 
is now as a normal method almost universally 
condemned. Certain forms of conciliation have 
received a greater but still very partial acceptance. 
For all these plans are remedial by intention, not 
preventive. They assume on the whole the exist- 
ing order, and they assume a code of industrial 
justice which does not yet exist. Their success 
would prevent the creation of the new order for 
which the more enlightened part of labor is striv- 
ing; their failure is the best proof that a new 
order is required. And it is instructive that in 
general those conciliation schemes have worked 
best which have not been mere temporary devices 
to end disputes which had arisen, but methods for 
bringing the management and the workers more 
continuously together in consultation. 

The most successful conciliation schemes, such 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 45 

as the remarkable instances in the Women's Cloth- 
ing Industries of New York City, have generally 
been part of a wider scheme of organization. 
And when they have broken down, as in part in 
the above mentioned case and as, notably, in the 
famous case of the Brooklands agreement in the 
Lancashire cotton industry, it is because labor 
demanded a greater share of control than capital 
was willing to yield. 

This points the direction towards which indus- 
try must move. Whatever else may be neces- 
sary it is clear that in the present temper of labor 
there is not the slightest hope of permanent suc- 
cess attaching to any plan which does not bring 
management and workers to one council table, 
not merely when disputes have already arisen, 
but continuously concerning all those matters from 
which disputes arise. Anything short of that 
leaves labor still in the position of a commodity 
— save that, unlike all proper commodities, labor 
resents the character so bestowed and proves its 
inappropriateness by endless insurrection and un- 
rest. To its seller, the wage-earner, labor always 
has meant, must mean, personality — life and the 
conditions of living; to its buyer, the employer, 



46 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

it has meant, under the drive of the competitive 
system and the pursuit of profits, only one raw 
material of production. It was inevitable that the 
wage-earner should come to insist, as soon as he 
felt the power to do so, on his being regarded 
from the former point of view. It is inevitable 
that, if his power and his enlightenment grow, 
he will insist upon it more and more. 

Right down to the roots of the present discon- 
tents the distinction between labor as commodity 
and labor as personality pierces. It is the claim 
of labor as personality which raises the issue above 
mere class selfishness and places it on the broad 
ground of social welfare. It is in the light of 
that claim that the solution must be sought and 
found. 

II 

Most of us are willing enough to do lip-service 
to the creed that labor is not, and should not be 
treated as, a commodity. Is it not, for example, 
now written in the law of the United States "that 
the labor of a human being is not a commodity 
or article of commerce"? But few realize how 
far that simple admission carries. For there is 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 47 

but one alternative to being treated as a com- 
modity, which is being treated as a person. And 
being treated as a person means being treated as 
one possessed of mind and will, capable of being 
educated, capable of being appealed to, capable 
of being self-directed — with a thousand other 
capacities of which, for this purpose, the most im- 
portant is that he works for the sake of living 
(and as a part of living) and does not live for 
the sake of working. In a word, the denial of the 
labor-commodity principle is meaningless or else 
it is the affirmation of the principle of "economic 
democracy." 

"Economic democracy" — the new phrase, the 
new demand, has to many a sinister, to others an 
inspiring sound. There are many who proclaim 
their faith in political democracy but stir uneasily 
when for "political" the adjective "economic" is 
substituted. The portentous word "Bolshevism" 
rises to the lips. They conjure up the picture 
of business taken over by a mob of workmen, 
without knowledge, without subordination, with- 
out responsibility — or else run, with equal ineffici- 
ency to a like disastrous end, by popularly elected 
governments. If that were indeed the transla- 



48 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

tion of "economic democracy" the condemnation 
would be just. Such experiments as have been 
made in that form of economic "self-government" 
have nearly all ended in shipwreck. But is that 
the meaning of the demand? It is too wide- 
spread, too vehement, to be evaded. It is too im- 
portant to be misunderstood. Misunderstanding 
creates dangers where they did not exist before, 
whereas understanding may remove the dangers 
that exist. 

The real demand of the worker is simple and 
unequivocal, however hard the translation into 
practice may prove. He is rebelling against the 
status of mere servant, as every intelligent being 
does in his heart. If there is any authority in 
the command, to do as we would be done by, it 
condemns the flat denial of this demand. For it 
is only those who possess this liberty who think 
that others should not have or share it. 

The growing need of the situation cannot be 
better stated than in a passage from the Report 
of the Commission appointed in 19 17 to inquire 
into the causes of industrial unrest in Great 
Britain. This Commission was divided into eight 
sections, each assigned to one section of the coun- 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 49 

try. The eight reports are of one accord in their 
recommendations, but the fullest and perhaps the 
most interesting, was that of Division No. 7, pre- 
sided over by Mr. D. L. Thomas, Chairman of 
the Workers' Educational Association of Wales. 
It contains the following: "We have repeatedly 
referred to the spirit of antagonism that has 
sprung up — the hostility to capitalism and the 
employing class on the one hand, and the too prev- 
alent hostility to trade-unionism on the other. . . . 
A new spirit of partnership is therefore essential. 
The precise mechanism of that partnership, es- 
pecially its details, can be left to be invented and 
developed at a later stage under the influence of 
the new spirit. It must be a growth from within, 
not something imposed from without, and it will 
doubtless take different forms in different indus- 
tries and possibly in different localities also. But 
there should be a clear perception at the start of 
at least the leading principles on which that part- 
nership or cooperation of the parties engaged 
in industry is to be based. 

"Two such principles, if we may so call them, 
appear to us to be fundamental: 

"(a) That the present system should be modi- 



50 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

fied in such a way as to identify the worker more 
closely with the control of the industry in which 
he is engaged. 

"(b) That every employe should be guaran- 
teed what we may call 'security of tenure' ; that is, 
that no workman should be liable to be dismissed 
except with the consent of his fellow-workmen as 
well as his employer. 

"The frank acceptance of these two princi- 
ples would, we believe, constitute such a recogni- 
tion of the personality of the worker as would 
instantly appeal to the better and nobler side of 
his nature, and would furnish a strong and steady 
stimulus to the development of a sense of responsi- 
bility within him. It would tend to remove the 
impression which so widely prevails in the ranks 
of labor that to the ordinary employer, labor is 
but a commodity to be bought cheap in the same 
way as its output is to be sold dear." 

The "economic democracy" set forth in these 
statesmanlike words is neither bogey nor idle 
dream. It represents the ever-growing, ever 
more vocal demand, not only of labor, but of all 
who, impressed with the social and economic 
wastefulness of the industrial system in the pres- 






THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 51 

ent, impressed with the ominous possibilities of 
its continuance in the stranger future that is dawn- 
ing, are seeking with resolute hope a better order 
of things. 

But it stands in sheer contrast to the common 
reality of economic autocracy, which is nowhere 
more flagrant or assertive than in America. To 
anyone who is at all familiar with industrial con- 
ditions this needs no proof, but it may be well to 
quote the striking admission of it contained in the 
recent Report of the President's Mediation Com- 
mission: 

"While not expressed in so many words," says 
the Commission, speaking specifically of the con- 
ditions in the Arizona mining district, "the domi- 
nant feeling of protest was that the industry was 
conducted upon an autocratic basis. The workers 
did not have representation in determining those 
conditions of their employment which vitally af- 
fected their lives as well as the company's out- 
put. Many complaints were, in fact, found by 
the Commission to be unfounded, but there was 
no safeguard against injustice except the say-so 
of one side of the controversy. In none of the 
mines were there direct dealings between com- 



52 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

panies and unions. In some mines grievance com- 
mittees had been recently established, but they 
were distrusted by the workers as subject to com- 
pany control, and, in any event, were not effective, 
because the final determination of every issue was 
left with the company. In place of orderly pro- 
cesses of adjustment, workers were given the 
alternative of submission or strike. . . • 

"The men demanded the removal of certain 
existing grievances as to wages, hours, and work- 
ing conditions, but the specific grievances were, 
on the whole, of relatively minor importance. 
The crux of the conflict was the insistence of the 
men that the right and the power to obtain just 
treatment were in themselves basic conditions of 
employment, and that they should not be compelled 
to depend for such just treatment on the benevo* 
lence or uncontrolled will of the employers. " 

Point is given to these remarks by the further 
statement of the Commission that, in a time of 
special urgency, one hundred million pounds of 
copper were lost in the Arizona producing region 
through wide-spread strikes lasting over three 
months. 

The present system is in its very nature an au- 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 53 

tocracy. Those who own determine essentially 
the lot of those who work, for the management 
represents the interest of those who own. It 
is in that interest that wage-rates are fixed and, 
beyond certain minimal determinations, the con- 
ditions of work appointed. Certain rates, by 
piece or time, are offered. The wage-earner can- 
not judge their "fairness," for he is ignorant of 
the complex machinery of production, in particu- 
lar of the relation of costs, of which his labor is 
counted part, to returns. He has no opportu- 
nity to learn. He lacks education and often leis- 
ure. Above all, his representatives cannot enter 
the council chamber where policy is determined. 
Yet that policy concerns him vitally, for on it 
may depend his standard of living, his chance of 
employment, his safety from or subjection to that 
excessive driving which wears out life. When 
new methods and processes are introduced and 
the wage-rates altered, he cannot estimate the 
"fairness" of the change. The great majority of 
employers believe, very often with truth, that 
their primary object in business, the making of 
profits, is furthered by low wage-rates. Is it not 
inevitable, if the knowledge of the conditions of 



54 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

production is exclusively theirs and the control 
over these conditions is vested in them alone, that 
employers are subject to constant temptation to ex- 
ploit labor, and workers subject to constant dep- 
rivation of what, on any theory of distribution, 
can be regarded as a "fair" return for their labor? 
On the other hand when labor is strong enough to 
exact its own terms, it feels, under these condi- 
tions, no responsibility to accommodate these to 
the welfare of the industry. Hence endless fric- 
tion and harassment, leading towards a ruinous 
impasse. 

Initiative, the condition of progress, and au- 
thority, the condition of order, must be secured 
under any system, democratic or autocratic. The 
analogy of political democracy holds perfectly 
here. Men shuddered at the chaos which would 
spring from the granting to all men of the ele- 
mentary rights of political citizenship — but in 
truth chaos sprang instead from the withholding 
of these. Imperfect as such democracy has been, 
it has not been the scramble of mob-rule nor yet 
the "cult of incompetence. " (Was incompetence 
ever more cultivated than in the Russian autoc- 
racy? Competence depends on the general 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 55 

standard of intelligence rather than the form of 
government.) For all its incompleteness democ- 
racy has not lacked direction or power. And no 
sword of Damocles is suspended over its head. 

As in the political, so in the economic sphere, 
it is true that no permanent social relationships 
can be built on servitude, on anything finally save 
the cooperation of willing partners — not equal 
partnership, for men differ in capacity and there- 
fore must differ in authority, but such partnership 
as will allow to all the choice, in due relation to 
others, of the disposal and direction of whatever 
powers they possess. This will come in the end, 
for there is always something resistless in the con- 
scious demand of any majority of men. It has 
proved so in respect of political government, 
though the world has passed, to learn it, through 
centuries of confusion and bloody strife. Must 
it be so in industry also, or do men learn only 
from the suffering imposed by blind resistance? 

Uncontrolled or irresponsible power is the grav- 
est danger of organized society. It is an inher- 
ent weakness of human nature everywhere that 
uncontrolled power over others breeds wanton 
upliftedness, the hubris with whose dire conse- 



56 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

quences the ancient Greeks were so mightily im- 
pressed. As surely as children are spoiled by 
deference, so are men by power for the use of 
which they need render no account. It is a fail- 
ing even more conspicuous in those who have 
themselves risen to such power from an inferior 
station, in the "self-made" man who has left the 
ranks of labor, in the foreman who has been 
chosen to petty autocracy over his fellows. Not 
infrequently the latter, uneducated both generally 
and in respect to the responsibilities of his particu- 
lar office, 

"Dress'd in a little brief authority, 
Plays such fantastic tricks, " 

as breed resentment and smoldering rebellion. 
With his brusque commands, his scorn of eluci- 
dations, and his constant threat of "firing," such 
a man becomes to the worker the concrete embodi- 
ment of the oppression he calls "capitalism." 
That men's livelihood should be, without appeal, 
at the mercy of the "choleric word" of such a 
tyrant reveals an autocratic condition of industry 
beyond justification to-day. It is always danger- 
ous when men hold irresponsible power over their 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 57 

fellows, whether to make their laws or to domi- 
nate their working lives. These are times when 
there is surely no need to insist upon that simple 
and terribly demonstrated truth. "Economic de- 
mocracy," in the sense above explained, is an in- 
evitable concomitant or part of that political de- 
mocracy which, whatever its difficulties and imper- 
fections, seems the only way out of the blood- 
stained wilderness into which power divorced from 
responsibility has led the world. 

Men are coming to realize the dependence of 
political power on economic power. At one time 
they regarded the vote as the key to the economic 
situation, and the extension of political democracy 
was fervently advocated and bitterly opposed on 
that account. But neither the hopes nor the fears 
aroused by the principle of political democracy 
have been fulfilled by its performance. The 
wage-earner got the vote, but when secured it 
lost its magic. He felt no better off than before. 
The right to vote became a futility to the man who 
could not thereby establish the right to a living 
wage, even the right to work. Consequently 
there was growing up before the war, among 
certain leaders of labor, a deep disappointment 



58 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

with the methods and results of ordinary politics. 
One English labor daily constantly spoke of the 
House of Commons as the House of Pretense. 
There was growing a conviction that salvation 
must come, not from the presence of labor in the 
councils of the State, but more from its presence 
in the councils of industry. It was coming to be 
felt that economic power dominated political 
power, rather than vice-versa; that those who con- 
trolled finance and commerce and manufacture in- 
evitably controlled the State also. In France, 
always prone to extremes of doctrine, this feeling 
resulted in syndicalism. But syndicalism combines 
two principles which have no necessary relation. 
It is at once a theory of industrial government 
and a program for its attainment. The theory 
might be sound, wholly or in part, even though 
the program stood condemned. And in fact the 
program revealed, by contrast, the very necessity 
of political action. For the only alternative syn- 
dicalism could offer, in its reaction from politics, 
was direct action by the "syndicates" or unions 
of workers, the seizure of economic control 
through sabotage, violence, and the general strike. 
This is destructive anarchy, not constructive 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 59 

democracy. But a saner form of the doctrine 
has been spreading in other lands. It is evidenced 
by the decline of the older type of State-socialism. 
The simpler socialism which wanted everything 
controlled from a single governing center in the 
State, which would "nationalize" everything and 
give a national government direct and complete 
control over it all, has lost its glamor. Central- 
ization under government has revealed its dangers, 
and experience of nationalization has not been 
such as to make labor desire its indefinite exten- 
sion over industry. Labor would apply the prin- 
ciple of nationalization further than it now ex- 
tends, to industries like transportation and min- 
ing which are the basis of all others; but even 
there it is beginning to demand decentralization 
and joint control as the necessary complement of 
the process. A growing minority accept the doc- 
trine of the "guildsmen," that State-socialism, as 
formerly advocated, is but guaranteed capitalism, 
and "nationalization," as formerly understood, 
but the ultimate policy of endangered capitalism, 
the "capitalist's last card." 

The same tendency to demand not State control 
but a direct share in industrial direction is evi- 



60 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

denced in more concrete ways. It is evidenced 
by the growing insistence of the unions on recogni- 
tion. It is evidenced by the breakdown of many 
promising schemes for industrial peace which made 
no provision for labor's sharing in the direct con- 
trol of its working conditions. Particularly in 
England, always in the van of industrial evolu- 
tion, is it growing too clear for misinterpretation. 
It is evidenced by the growth of industrial as 
distinct from craft unionism. It is evidenced by 
the growth of the "shop-stewards' movement," 
particularly in the machinists' trades. The sig- 
nificance of the shop-steward, who from being a 
mere collector of trade union dues in the shop 
has come to challenge the old-line leaders, is that 
he represents industrial as distinct from craft 
unionism. This is a difference not merely of 
structure but of ideal. Under the old craft union- 
ism a dozen different organizations might control 
the workers in a single plant, whereas under in- 
dustrial unionism the workshop is itself the unit 
of organization. It is obvious that the latter 
type is much more in harmony with the principle 
of direct control. Again it is evidenced by the 
institution of "works committees," as a representa- 



THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 61 

tive agency for bringing workers and management 
together. It is noteworthy that a number of 
large English employers, such as Hans Renold, 
Ltd., Barr and Stroud, Rowntree, and others, 
have welcomed these committees and regard them 
as a great aid both to production and to harmony. 
Finally, it is evidenced by the reception accorded 
to the Whitley Report and its adoption by the 
British Government, of which more anon. 

Because the world has changed the place of 
labor must also change. It is not generally re- 
alized that the conditions of modern industry make 
it necessary that the worker should find a new 
source of interest in his working life. The days 
of the craft are gone, and with them the old spirit 
of craftsmanship and the particular satisfaction 
it afforded. The individual worker can no longer 
as a rule look upon the finished product as the 
child of his hands. His individuality is not re- 
vealed to him in the product, one of whose thou- 
sand mechanical processes he has controlled. He 
has lost that specific interest forever. A new 
interest has become necessary, correspondent to 
his new function. Just as general skill is in the 
machine age taking the place of specific skill, so 



62 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

must a general interest be found to take the place 
of the lost specific interest. This can be found 
only in the sense of the worker that he is an ac- 
tive participant and partner in the whole process 
of production within which his own work falls. 

Where would this process of industrial "de- 
mocratization" end? No man can tell. In hu- 
man affairs only the next step ahead is clear, and 
that is clear only because it is necessary. One 
immediate consequence, however, would seem to 
be that in this development management must 
grow into a separate industrial function, becom- 
ing management in the strict sense of the term, 
the function of securing the most efficient adapta- 
tion of means to end, of productive power to prod- 
uct. The proper function of management, as Mr. 
Webb points out in The Works Manager of To- 
day, is the reduction of the net cost of produc- 
tion. This net cost, however, cannot be estimated 
aright unless we recognize the worker as in some 
sense a partner, one for whose sake production 
is taking place. To reduce costs at his cost is not 
the function of management, nor would it ever 
seem to be such if labor were represented in the 



JHE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 63 

direction of industry as well as capital. Manage- 
ment would then appear in its true light, and be 
relieved from the distractions and the embarrass- 
ments inspired by its dependence on capital alone. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE WIDENING OF THE IDEA OF LABOR 

The conflict in the ranks of labor. Wage-earner 
or producer — which does "labor" signify? 
Leon Trotzky and Arthur Henderson. Ca- 
tastrophic or progressive revolution? The 
soil of catastrophic revolution. American 
labors apathy to the broader questions of 
policy. The advance of the British Labor 
Party. 

There is an internal conflict proceeding in the 
van of the labor movement whose issue will have 
momentous consequences not only on the direction 
of that movement but also on the character of our 
whole social structure. It springs from the funda- 
mental question, What is Labor? Whom shall 
it include? Two opposing views are vehemently 
advocated. The one party would limit the idea 
of "labor" to the class of wage-earners, exclud- 
ing the "brain-workers," the administrators of in- 
dustry, the technicians, the professional workers 

of all kinds. To this party all these are but the 

64 



WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 65 

instruments, conscious or unconscious, of its enemy, 
capitalism. On the other hand there is a party 
which would extend the idea of labor to include 
all who in any real sense can be called workers 
or producers, whether they work with brains or 
hands (though that is a poor enough distinction, 
since nobody works with brain alone or hand 
alone), whether they sit at desks or toil in fields 
or factories, whether they wear fine linen or over- 
alls. With either view goes a corresponding 
policy. The former party rejects all compro- 
mises, detests all devices for industrial harmony 1 ' 
as props of a vicious system, dulling in the worker 
the sense of its iniquity, and proclaims the revo- 
lution. The latter party would emulate the tide 
and not the storm, advancing foot by foot, gaining 
ground wherever opportunity is given, and accept- 
ing the orderly agencies of social and industrial 
change, the law-making power, the taxing power, 
the bargaining power of organized labor, as the 
means whereby its aims shall be achieved. It 
shuns the counsels of violence, its most forward 
minds perceiving how insecure, how uncontrol- 
lable, how subject to reaction and counter-over- 
throw, are the results of social convulsion. The 



66 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

goal may be revolution none the less, but revolu- 
tion progressively and not catastrophically to be 
attained. 

The following statements, explanatory of the at- 
titude of two great protagonists of these opposing 
doctrines, may suffice to suggest the supreme im- 
portance of this issue. 

Leon Trotzky, in his striking manifesto on 
"The Bolsheviki and World-Peace," looks to a 
great after-war proletarian uprising. "Even 
though the vanguard," he says, "of the working 
class knew in theory that Might is the mother of 
Right, still their political thinking was completely 
permeated by the spirit of opportunism, of adap- 
tation to bourgeois legalism. Now they are learn- 
ing from the teachings of facts to despise this 
legalism and tear it down. . . . The possessing 
classes, to their consternation, will soon have to 
recognize this change. A working class that has 
been through the school of war will feel the need 
of using the language of force as soon as the first 
serious obstacle faces them within their own coun- 
try. 'Necessity knows no law,' the workers will 
cry when the attempt is made to hold them back 
at the command of the bourgeois law. And pov- 



WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 67 

erty, the terrible poverty that pervails during this 
war and will continue after its close, will be of a 
sort to force the masses to violate many a bour- 
geois law. . . . This must lead to profound po- 
litical conflicts, which, ever-widening and deepen- 
ing, may take on the character of a social revolu- 
tion, the course and outcome of which no one, of 
course, can now foresee." For his own country, 
and with his own aid, it did not require the end 
of the war to bring fulfillment to that menacing 
prophecy. 

Arthur Henderson, whose understanding of the 
necessities of the Russian situation, as it existed 
in the summer of 19 17, led to his resignation from 
the British cabinet soon afterwards, as leader of 
the British Labor Party, issued a pronouncement 
of a very different kind. In an article on "The 
Outlook for Labor" he put forward the new doc- 
trine of his party on this subject. "No one," he 
says, "who is engaged in productive work, whether 
of hand or brain, will be excluded from the new 
comradeship which we are organizing; and as for 
the non-productive classes, we hardly expect that 
any number of them will want to join a party 
movement which seeks to make their parasitical 



68 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

existence impossible. The Labor Party, in short, 
is the party of the producers — of the workers, in 
the widest sense of that noble word: of all the 
people, without distinction of class or sex, who 
labor to enrich the community." Inevitably, a 
party so interpreting the scope of labor rejects 
the facile theory of blind revolution, and projects 
a program of reconstruction, drastic but attain- 
able only by orderly process, by appeal and educa- 
tion, by the winning of a voting majority, and 
thus by the seizure of the constitutional machinery 
of change. 

When the alternative is offered, nearly all men 
prefer peaceful to violent ways. The long-suf- 
fering of men is far more remarkable than their 
rebelliousness. It is only when despair seizes 
their hearts, when oppression reveals them im- 
potent or destitution renders them reckless, when, 
in truth, they "have nothing to lose but their 
chains," that they surrender to the gospel of vio- 
lence. All the catastrophic creeds of insurrec- 
tionary labor, Marxism, syndicalism, Bolshevism, 
I. W. W.ism, are reactions from intolerable condi- 
tions. Thus the revolutionary syndicalism of the 
first decade of the twentieth century was born out 



WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 69 

of the traditional weakness of French trade- 
unionism and the traditional repressiveness of the 
French Government, illuminated, for example, by 
such experiences as the suppression of the school- 
teachers' union and the breaking of the great rail- 
way strike by the perilously dramatic coup of an 
ex-socialist premier who called the strikers to the 
colors. Bolshevism was made possible — and 
necessary — by outrageous tyranny, incurable cor- 
ruption, and infinite misery. I. W, W.ism re- 
flects the resolution of despair which animates, 
under the harrow of ruthless exploitation, certain 
portions of American unskilled labor. It springs 
up where unionism is most helpless, among aliens 
and homeless migrants, among miserably paid 
mill-hands and railway laborers who see — how 
can they? — no other means of escape from the 
darkness of the pit which our society has digged 
for them. This is the judgment of such able 
investigators as the late Professor Carleton W. 
Parker and the members of the President's Media- 
tion Commission whose report has already been 
cited. For all so situated the idea of labor is, of 
necessity, narrowed until it applies only to the 
"proletarian," to the "wage-victim." Thus nar- 



70 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

rowed, it stimulates a program of catastrophic 
overthrow, for what other way is open to a group 
so bereft of status, so poor in resources, and so 
completely cut off from all the springs of power? 

Some of those who are loudest in their condem- 
nation of labor insurrection are themselves most 
responsible for its growth, by blocking the legiti- 
mate avenues of union activity. Thus the Presi- 
dent's Mediation Commission says: "This un- 
compromising attitude on the part of employers 
has reaped for them an organization of destruc- 
tive rather than constructive radicalism. The 
I. W. W. is filling the vacuum created by the 
operators. The red card is carried by large num- 
bers throughout the Pacific Northwest. Efforts 
to rectify evils through the trade-union movement 
have largely failed because of the small headway 
trade unions are able to make. Operators claim 
that the nature of the industry presents inherent 
obstacles to unionization. But a dominant reason 
is to be found in the bitter attitude of the oper- 
ators towards any organization among their em- 
ployes." 

Here we have merely one manifestation of that 
age-old phenomenon,the spirit of humanity revolt- 



WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 71 

ing against servitude to man. The attempt to 
crush these movements by frontal attack, by de- 
nunciation, by imprisonment and fine, by suppres- 
sion and counter-violence, will never succeed. 
There is but one way to avoid revolution, and 
that is to change the conditions, the conditions 
represented in this country by Lowell and Law- 
rence and Fall River, by the mining camps of 
Arizona and the lumber camps of Louisiana and 
California, the conditions which breed, in all who 
are not reduced by them to the enduring stupidity 
of oxen, the revolutionary mind. 

The best illustration of the relation between a 
narrowed idea of labor and the catastrophic 
method (as the only alternative to impotence) is 
found in the clear-cut principle of Marxism, the 
great inspiration of all such movements. It 
draws a hard-and-fast line between the "prole- 
tariat," the wage-earning class, and the "bour- 
geoisie," the capitalistic class. Its method is the 
"class-war," and therefore it seeks to sharpen the 
class-consciousness of the wage-earner. It pours 
contempt on all "opportunism," all moderation, 
all reformism, for these weaken the sense of class- 
distinction, the necessary lever of revolution. It 



72 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

would reverse the dominance of classes, by the 
triumph of the proletariat. That is the revolu- 
tion, and beyond that it scarcely looks. It com- 
bines simplicity of doctrine, the all-sufficient divi- 
sion of mankind into the exploiters and the ex- 
ploited, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with 
the mysticism of the Hegelian dialectic. The 
simplicity and the mysticism are alike misleading, 
but they exercise together a powerful appeal; 
for the mystic element, with its suggestion of an 
uninvestigated land of promise beyond the revolu- 
tion, cloaks the weakness of the logic. 

It is well to remember that this doctrine arose 
in the Germany of the mid-nineteenth century, 
which was carrying over into the industrial field 
the sharp class distinctions of feudalism. Marx 
himself was not a "proletarian," but a "bour- 
geois" of protestant Jewish origin, a detached 
and ironic personality seeking with bitter insight 
the means of overthrowing the existing regime. 
Wherever class domination is strongly entrenched 
behind law and usage, in particular wherever the 
middle class is subservient, as in Germany, or in- 
significant, as in Russia, there is the proper soil 
for the seed of Marxism. Hence its origin and 



WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 73 

growth in Germany — hence its fateful power in 
the second Russian revolution. But Western de- 
mocracy is a different soil, even though the same 
weeds of industrial exploitation flourish therein, 
and the attempts to transplant the Marxist doc- 
trine have had relatively little success. On the 
contrary, there is reason for holding that the 
failure of the once powerful Knights of Labor 
was in great measure due to the attempt of this 
organization to build a labor class consciousness, 
though not on Marxist principles. There are 
signs that more recent industrial developments, 
the consolidation of large-scale business and the 
completer fixation of the wage-earning status as 
free lands become a memory of the past, are 
working towards the sharpened distinction be- 
tween "labor" and "capital." But other de- 
velopments, in especial the newer immigration, 
have been placing effectual obstacles in the way 
of solidarity. To-day the solidarity of the dom- 
inant labor force in America is neither that of 
class-conscious proletarianism nor yet that inspired 
by the sense of the common interest of all pro- 
ducers : it is merely that of group-conscious union- 
ized skilled labor. The great body of labor so 



74 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

inspired, in its too exclusive devotion to immedi- 
ate ends, does not yet understand that here are 
the two final alternatives for labor, the limitation 
of the idea to the class of wage-earners (which 
indeed for American labor would be an extension 
rather than a limitation) or else the inclusion 
within the idea of the whole class of producers. 
In the former case it must move within a circle 
of narrow aims unless it breaks through by the 
blind violence of mere numbers; embracing the 
latter alternative it envisages, makes possible, 
and prepares an industrial order fit for a real de- 
mocracy, maintained by the self-government of 
those who produce instead of by the autocracy of 
those who own. 

In Great Britain labor has been moving to this 
latter conception, in spite of the practical difficul- 
ties which it involves. It has opened its ranks 
freely to all who accept its platform, whether or 
not they are enrolled in trade unions or otherwise 
directly associated with wage-earning. The line it 
draws is not between the wage-earner and all the 
rest, but between the active worker or producer on 
the one hand and the mere "profiteer" and the pas- 
sive recipient of rent and interest on the other. It 



WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 7s 

welcomes the extension of unionism to the profes- 
sions, to the civil service, to clerks and all manner 
of employes of all grades. Its prophets are be- 
ginning to see the disastrous effects of having the 
technical ability and administrative skill on the op- 
posing side. They are beginning to see that the 
side which can win the brains of industry can win 
the battle. The effect of the war, with its enor- 
mous imposition of new burdens on all producers, 
causing a great part of the results of their labor to 
pass over, in the form of interest on war bonds, to 
non-producers, will make easier the new appeal. 
"Over this issue," says the manifesto of the Brit- 
ish Labor Party already referred to, "of how 
the financial burden of the war is to be borne, 
and how the necessary revenue is to be raised, the 
greatest political battles will be fought. In this 
matter the Labor Party claims the support of four- 
fifths of the whole nation, for the interests of the 
clerk, the teacher, the doctor, the minister of re- 
ligion, the average retail shopkeeper and trader, 
and all the mass of those living on small incomes 
are identical with those of the artisan." 

While labor in the States has yet scarcely 
reached the parting of the ways, it is significant 



76 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

that labor in Canada, closely associated as it is 
in temper and organization with the former, is 
choosing the greater alternative. It has recently 
approved of the formation of a Labor Party of 
Canada, and this party, already alive and active, 
has resolved to admit individual members who, 
whether members of unions or not, subscribe to 
its constitution and program ; while it proclaims as 
its general object the promotion of the Apoliti- 
cal, social and economic emancipation of the peo- 
ple, and more particularly of those who depend 
directly upon their own exertions by hand or brain 
for the means of life." 

This seems the inevitable road for labor in 
lands where political democracy is already some- 
what advanced. By following that road British 
and Canadian labor are moving to take a greater 
part than before in the determination of the life 
of the community. (But see footnote p. 161.) 



CHAPTER V 

THE WASTE OF THE PRESENT INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 

The meaning of waste. The waste of industrial 
strife and of the disharmony between manage* 
ment and workers. The universal waste of 
competition. The waste of unemployment. 
The waste of labor-turnover. The loss of 
educationl opportunity. The lack of voca- 
tional guidance and of the adaptation of work 
to aptitude. The waste involved in working 
conditions, especially of women and children. 
The waste of the disparity of wealth. Wealth 
and well-being. 

Nearly everybody seems willing to admit to- 
day that some change in the conditions of indus- 
try is both possible and desirable. But by what 
means? And how much? Some would be con- 
tent to patch up the old industrial structure — a 
little cement and paint, they think, will serve — 
while others want it rebuilt, reconstructed, even 
from the foundations. Our attitude to this ques- 
tion, so far as it is not determined by the sense 

77 



78 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

of our immediate interest, will depend on our 
appreciation of the amount of waste involved in 
the existing system, and then on the extent of 
our belief in the feasibility of a system which 
would avoid that waste. To understand the 
problem we must begin by realizing the significance 
of the wastefulness which characterizes our mod- 
ern industry. 

By waste I mean all that loss, of potential 
material resources, of potential energy and skill, 
and finally of potential well-being, due to human 
mismanagement, disharmony, and lack of the in- 
telligent direction of means to ends. A system 
might be, by comparison, very productive and at 
the same time very wasteful. The present in- 
dustrial system is many times more productive 
than the old domestic system, and yet it is, as 
a system, excessively and wickedly wasteful. 

We are apt to think too narrowly on this sub- 
ject. One obvious form of waste arrests our 
attention, and we seldom realize that it is only 
one, and far from the most serious, of many. 
I mean the loss due to the direct strife of labor 
and capital, in particular the loss caused by strikes 
and lockouts. According to the Report of the 



WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 79 

Department of Labor already referred to, there 
occurred in the United States during the period 
1881-1905, 38,303 strikes and lockouts, lasting 
on an average 31 days, involving 199,954 estab- 
lishments and 7,444,954 employes apart from 
those incidentally thrown out of work. In Can- 
ada, for the five years 1911-15 the time-loss 
from strikes and lockouts is given officially as 
nearly five million working days. But these losses, 
well worth consideration as they are, shrink to in- 
significance in the sum total of industrial wastage. 
The whole time-loss amounts to no more than 
the time devoted to a few holidays in the 
year. It is little, indeed, compared with the in- 
direct loss caused by the mutual distrust of work- 
ers and management. For Great Britain, Mr. 
Sidney Webb has estimated that, as a consequence 
of the standardization of product, the use of auto- 
matic machinery wherever possible, of team work 
and specialization among the workers, and other 
changes made possible for the most part by the 
abrogation of trade union rules, "the 15,000 or 
20,000 establishments, large or small, in every 
conceivable industry, with which the Ministry 
of Munitions, the Board of Trade, the War Trade 



80 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

Department, and the Admiralty have been in 
touch, are now turning out, on an average, more 
than twice the product per operative employed 
that they did before the war; whilst, assuming 
the same standard rates of wages, grade by grade, 
the labor-cost works out considerably lower than 
under the old system." This is not, as some 
simple-minded people imagine, a condemnation 
of trade-union rules under the old system; it is a 
condemnation of the system and not of the rules, 
for the latter were evolved by the workers, as the 
result of bitter experience, to protect them against 
the grinding wheels of competitive industry. The 
irony of the situation lies in this, that the worker 
in his not unjustified fear of immediate competi- 
tive evils, is driven to resist the very process which 
makes possible the abolition of the poverty under 
which he suffers, to wit, the increase of his own 
productive power. 

In truth, the most pervasive cause of waste is 
the competitive organization — or disorganization 
— of industry. The old-fashioned theory of the 
excelling virtue of competition — the "soul of 
trade," the u fly-wheel of industry," the leveler, 
the equalizer, the spring of inventiveness, the safe- 



WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 81 

guard of the consumer, the determinant of prog- 
ress — a theory already discarded by the success- 
ful man of business — received a further deadly 
blow when the urgency of the war compelled every 
belligerent nation to limit, for the sake of clear 
economy, this wasteful conflict, bringing each es- 
sential industry into the form of a quasi-coopera- 
tive whole. This is not the place to examine in 
detail the dangers and the advantages of such a 
course. I believe that there is no way back, and 
that the lauded benefits of free competition, which 
it so very partially achieved, must now be sought, 
and may be far better secured, by enlightened co- 
operation. Of this I am confident, that only by 

the way of coordination is it possible to abolish 

i 

the more deadly forms of waste which have char- 
acterized our modern industry. Under "free" 
competition, one or two rapacious employers can 
set a standard which the rest must follow; under 
it worker and employer alike are at the mercy 
of every chance fluctuation of demand and supply; 
under it an inevitable reserve of unemployed labor 
is constantly reducing the mass of workers to the 
subsistence level and driving a large proportion 
of them below the line of poverty. Most of the 



82 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

further wastes which we must now review are 
products of the system of "free" competition. 

In saying this I do not mean to suggest that 
competition as a motive and stimulus in industry 
can or should be abolished. The waste we are 
considering is due, strictly speaking, not to the 
presence of competition but to the absence of or- 
ganization. The "free" competition of workers 
or of employers means that they are not intelli- 
gent enough, or strong .enough, to cooperate in 
pursuit of their common interest. They are de- 
feating their respective ends by competing among 
themselves, and the service of the whole com- 
munity is not, as I believe, best fulfilled in the proc- 
ess. The old theory minimized the common inter- 
est. Under "free" competition what one loses 
another gains — but not to the extent of the loss of 
the former. There is always a residuum of waste, 
and when the competition is for the mere means 
of livelihood the waste is so great as to be disas- 
trous. 

If the question is raised, "How then can we 
distinguish between the competition which is bene- 
ficial and that which is harmful to society?" the 
answer, in general, is simple. Competition as a 



WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 83 

substitute for cooperation is wasteful, competi- 
tion within a cooperative order is a highly neces- 
sary stimulus. Competition as a substitute for 
cooperation, as for example that of unorganized 
workers to obtain work, means a certain frustra- 
tion by each of all the rest in the pursuit of an 
object or interest which all of the qualified appli- 
cants can or should be able to obtain. Competi- 
tion within a system of cooperation, say competi- 
tion for promotion, if conducted on the basis of 
relative merits, belongs to a quite different order* 
In this case the limit of common interest has al- 
ready been reached. Of two competitors for ad- 
vancement to a single office, only one can possibly 
achieve his end. Here competition is both neces- 
sary and beneficial. 

The truth that disorganization Jof which cer- 
tain types of competition are a concomitant) and 
not competition as such as the enemy is reenforced 
when we remember that the relation between 
workers and employers, whether haphazard or 
well-ordered, is not a competitive one at all. Em- 
ployers compete with employers and workers with 
workers, but employers do not compete with work- 
ers. These two cooperate (more or less will- 



84 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

ingly, but always necessarily) in production, and 
they bargain in respect of the return from their 
productive cooperation. In both regards disor- 
ganization is in general profound, and the conse- 
quent waste incalculable. 

Consider, again, the waste due to unemployment 
and underemployment. The imperious demands 
of warfare have reduced unemployment to a mini- 
mum unknown before, but always in normal times 
there is a certain percentage of unemployed, vary- 
ing with the season of the year. In periods of 
depression it reaches catastrophic proportions, 
and hasty palliatives are adopted to relieve the 
more obvious cases of distress. Since most people 
are quite unaware of the magnitude of this evil, 
it may be well to give some figures. In 1905, ac- 
cording to the U. S. Federal Census of Manufac- 
turers, the number of wage-earners in employ- 
ment fluctuated from 7,017^138 in one month to 
4,599,091 in another. In the winter of 1914-15, 
there were, according to the investigation under- 
taken by the Metropolitan Life Assurance Com- 
pany, 442,000 persons unemployed in New York 
City. In the same winter the Ontario Commis- 
sion on Unemployment reported some 30,000 



WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 85 

unemployed in that province. It is hard to con- 
ceive the fearful human significance of figures 
such as these. And it is all sheer waste, waste of 
so much productive power and therefore of ma- 
terial resources, waste of health and decency and 
happiness. Besides, the standing menace of un- 
employment acts as a pernicious influence over 
the whole field of industry. It is the more tragic 
in that all thorough students of the subject are 
agreed that intelligent reorganization of industry 
would reduce genuine unemployment to a small 
fraction of its present extent. This would re- 
move that dread which more than any other em- 
bitters the worker's life, makes him feel that he 
is a mere "wage-slave," and renders him hostile, 
because of their disturbing effect on employment, 
to all developments of the industrial process. 

Take again the loss due to "labor-turnover." 
If a plant employing a thousand workers requires 
to hire during the year five hundred more in order 
to maintain its force of a thousand, then it is said 
to have an annual labor-turnover of fifty per cent. 
The labor-turnover of modern industry is a damn- 
ing evidence of material and spiritual waste. In 
some cases it reaches quite amazing figures, such 



86 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

as the six thousand per cent per annum which re- 
cent employment figures for eight months on the 
Pennsylvania Lines West reveal. This was of 
course due to exceptional and transitory condi- 
tions, but annual turnovers of five hundred and 
six hundred per cent seem by no means very rare. 
The study by Mr. Grieves of a number of metal 
plants in the Middle West showed a turnover of 
more than 150 per cent, and Mr. Boyd Fisher 
found the turnover in a large number of Detroit 
plants to average more than 250 per cent. To in- 
terpret these figures we must think not only of the 
direct loss involved in fitting new men into the 
place of the old — a loss only now coming to be un- 
derstood — but also of the social loss due to thelack 
of stability and direction in this drifting mass of 
casual workers. This latter can of course never be 
calculated, but wherever we find work casualized 
we find men decivilized, aliens and sometimes even 
"alien enemies" of society, losing all strength and 
unity of purpose so that life degenerates into a 
fumbling series of maladjustments to the more ele- 
mentary and animal needs. From such a fate it 
may sometimes be the best, and not the worst, who 
seek a refuge in rebelliousness. And this too id 



WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 87 

mere waste, the penalty of disorganization. Some 
amount of labor turnover is of course inevitable ; 
a limited amount may even be regarded as desir- 
able, as expressing the mobility due to opportunity, 
but nothing can justify the figures already cited. 
That much can be done to diminish labor- 
turnover is revealed by the classic instance of the 
Ford Works in Detroit, where the percentage in 
19 1 2-13, a normally good year, was over four 
hundred, and in 19 13-14 was only twenty-three. 
It would not be fair to suggest that every manu- 
facturer can or should emulate the methods possi- 
ble to Ford, but there are sufficient cases already 
on record — such as those of the Dennison Manu- 
facturing Company, the Plimpton Press, and the 
Joseph Feiss Company — to show that intelligent 
consideration of the human factor can vastly re- 
duce this waste. 

Is there not something here worthy of deep 
reflection, that no company could exist which com- 
pletely changed its plant or its site or its manage- 
ment two or three or more times in the year, 
whereas a like change in respect of its body of 
workers is not only possible, but actually happens 



88 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

without exciting, in most cases, any flicker of 
attention or concern? 

A profound source of waste is the lack of edu- 
cational opportunity, from which the urgencies 
of competitive livelihood shut off too soon the 
great majority of the people. The extension of 
educational opportunity would work for welfare; 
in many ways. It would relieve the labor market 
and thus help to solve an immediate problem of 
the future. It would increase efficiency, and thus 
in due course the available wealth of the country. 
It would evoke talent and genius where it lies un- 
aroused or thwarted. It would help men to un- 
derstand their common interests, and so to build 
on that basis the unity of society. Finally — for 
the education of which I am thinking is social 
as well as technical and vocational — it would help 
men to live, which is all that matters. 

We are now beginning to see the national im- 
portance of technical schools, trade schools, 
schools for employment managers, supervisors, 
foremen, and so on. It is all part of that pro- 
gressive application of science which, the source 
of wealth through power, is able, in a decently 
ordered society, to raise human conditions above 



JYASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 89 

the level of deadening necessity. Science unap- 
plied is humanity wasted, though we must be sure 
that it is true science we apply. There are indus* 
trial spheres to which the application of science 
is still only rudimentary, with corresponding loss. 
There is, in particular, very little done to secure 
a proper adjustment between worker and work. 
More care and expense have in general been be- 
stowed on the attainment of mechanical efficiency 
than on the adaptation of industrial operations 
to the particular aptitudes and needs of the opera- 
tives. Here, as always, the loss is twofold, in 
the worker and in the work, waste at once of 
wealth and of humanity. 

The waste due to evil working conditions, ex- 
cessive toil and strain, unhealthy surroundings, 
and unnecessary exposure to the risks of accident 
and poisoning, great as it is in the case of men, 
is more flagrant still and more pernicious in the 
case of women and of children. America has an 
unhappy distinction in the laxness of its factory 
laws for the regulation of the industrial work of 
children, that most wasteful of all immediate 
economies. As for the labor of women, I shall 
have occasion later to speak of it more especially. 



90 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

The squandering of the health and strength of 
women is one of the great smirches on our civiliza- 
tion. Their special needs are so little regarded 
that their normal hours of work often impose on 
them a heavy undermining strain ; that rest-rooms, 
rest-periods, and facilities for ceasing work in ac- 
cord with physiological requirements are often 
unprovided; and that they are allowed to (or 
by poverty compelled to) toil in factories in the 
periods before and after childbirth. 

Finally there is the intolerable waste due to 
the extreme disparity of the distribution of wealth. 
The extreme poverty of masses of workers, with 
its sordid and ceaseless harassment, cramping 
and perverting and devitalizing all healthy hu- 
man instincts, gains especial bitterness from the 
contrast with the mere superfluity which their 
labor helps to create for others. The attempt to 
justify this disparity in terms of "natural selec- 
tion" has now become vain and obsolete. One 
of the most certain of economic (or psychologi- 
cal) laws is the "principle of diminishing utility." 
According to this principle, an additional dollar 
or two a week means more, renders more service, 
to the family whose income is twenty dollars, 



>VASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 91 

than to the family whose income is two hundred, 
still more than to the family whose income is two 
thousand. From which it follows that any redis- 
tribution of wealth which, without disastrous dis- 
turbance, rendered less unequal the shares of rich 
and poor, would increase the total service of 
wealth, that which alone justifies it or its pursuit, 
the contribution it makes to welfare. If this prin- 
ciple holds, how wasteful must a civilization be 
which concentrates, as in America, 60 per cent of 
the national wealth in the possession of 2 per cent 
of the nation, while another 5 per cent of the 
wealth is shared out in the poverty of 65 per cent 
of the people ! 

For there is after all only one kind of waste, 
waste of well-being, of the opportunity really to 
live. All else is waste only if it means a loss of 
that. All achievement is vain if it does not also 
achieve that. I have dwelt largely on the ma- 
terial side, but this economic loss is simply an im- 
perfect index of spiritual loss. Where you find 
the one you may look for the other. Here is 
found the true condemnation of the "unmeaning 
taskwork" which fills the existence of multitudes, 
of the kind of poverty which denies them alike 



92 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

the resources and the leisure to live. It is be- 
cause science shows a way out of this waste, pro- 
vided we have the will and the intelligence to take 
it, that the future of industry — which is after all 
the future of the world — gleams with hope 
through the darkness of the present. It is that 
prospect which demands and justifies all the efforts 
we can make to achieve a real industrial recon- 
struction. There has been too much sacrifice of 
life and happiness in the horrible waste of war 
for any of us to be indifferent to what remains or 
to what may yet be restored or won. 



.CHAPTER VI 

THE CRISIS 

War and social instability. The appeal of radi- 
cal programs in the revulsion after war. The 
moral necessity of new labor conditions. The 
great opportunity: grounds for hopes and 
fears. The critical first period. 

Wars have been deliberately planned— so it is 
said — to break up the internal forces of radical- 
ism by the strong counter-appeal of national ag- 
grandizement. If it be so, it is another instance 
of the want of imagination and the misunderstand- 
ing of history which are among the most marked 
spiritual qualities of militarism. At the outset 
war inevitably checks all radical movements and 
even fosters the reactionary spirit. But its after- 
effect seems often to be of the opposite charac- 
ter. There are instances of this kind all through 
history, since the time when the sailors of Salamis 
changed the Athenian constitution. Waterloo 
was followed by Peterloo and all the ferment that 

93 



94 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

led toward the Reform Act. The Franco-Prus- 
sian war gave birth to the Paris Commune and the 
Third Republic. The Russo-Japanese war was 
succeeded by the revolutionary movement of 
1905, the forerunner of the immense Russian 
revolution which the Great War made possible. 
War on a grand scale always means a break with 
the past. It often generates at the last a sense of 
revulsion which, reenforced by the condition of 
poverty and of war-indebtedness, gives a new oc- 
casion to the forces that make for social upheaval. 
Those who imagined that this war would break 
up labor radicalism have by this time discovered 
their mistake. The party of the left is rising 
from its submergence in the war spirit. In Great 
Britain, most notably, the Labor Party is seizing 
the opportunity which the changing national mood 
presents. 

For one thing, a <c labor party" is the only party 
which professes a sweeping program of industrial 
reconstruction. The Provisional Report on Re- 
construction issued by a committee of the Brit- 
ish Labor Party is a document deserving the 
most careful study. It has a strength and assur- 
ance, a clearness of statement and certainty of aim 



THE CRISIS 95 

which all must acknowledge, whether or not we 
accept its specific proposals. It is not, like many 
previous manifestoes of labor, the proclamation 
of principles in the void, with no expectation of 
their fulfillment. So forthright a program has a 
great advantage in a time of grave instability 
like the present. Men who have seen and shared 
in catastrophic changes realize in a new way the 
possibility of the changes they themselves desire, 
and are more disposed to seek them. Men who 
have seen the world upturned are no longer de- 
terred by the idea of revolution. The potentiali- 
ties of good and evil, of reconstruction and of dis- 
integration, herein revealed, call insistently for 
the highest statesmanship we can find. 

Further, there is a moral necessity in the new 
situation which cannot be ignored. It is the State 
which called from their ordinary employments 
the myriads of munition and other war workers; 
it is the State which called to arms the myriads 
of soldiers. Must not the State be responsible for 
their complete replacement in industrial life? The 
soldiers who return to normal life do so in the 
consciousness of having deserved well of the 
country to which they offered up their lives. [This 



96 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

gives a great moral backing to their demand for 
industrial security. How, for example, can it be 
any longer possible to justify their subjections to 
the hazards of unemployment? The country 
that dared to claim their lives must ensure that 
they are not deprived of their livelihood. They 
demand employment, security, and a "fair" return 
for their toil, these at least, and they must some- 
how or other be provided. Somehow or other — ■ 
with waste and haste or with forethought and 
productiveness, according to the blindness or the 
vision of our governments. 

I have tried in the preceding chapters to ex- 
plain the new position and demands of labor. 
These have not arisen out of the war situation; 
they issue out of that secular process by which 
men first come to understand and then endeavor 
to control the systems in which their lives are 
bound. The war has hastened the process only 
as a storm shakes from the tree the ripening fruit. 
There is no natural fruitfulness in calamity, but 
it may shatter the clinging timidities which impede 
the acceptance of new ideals. Then it becomes 
dangerous to despise or to ignore them. I am 
convinced that the first necessity of the industrial 



THE CRISIS 97 

situation is the sympathetic understanding of these 
demands and the attempt to meet them so far as 
they make for the welfare of the whole commu- 
nity. Merely to oppose them may turn a peaceful 
into a catastrophic process. Only by facing the 
facts can we escape this catastrophe. The major- 
ity of those outside its ranks are strangely igno- 
rant of the conditions of labor— and this ignorance 
is in fact another form of the exclusive class-con- 
sciousness which in the workers we condemn. 
Ignorance, on either side, in matters of this kind, 
is never merely ignorance; it is also prejudice. 
We must in this situation, those of us who do not 
belong to its ranks in the narrower sense, take 
common counsel with labor, understand its claims, 
at least offer some other solution if we cannot 
accept its own, and so endeavor to secure that 
harmony of industrial life which was not attained 
in the past, but will be more imperative than ever 
in our war-impoverished future. 

What are we doing towards that end? The 
time for action has already come. What steps 
are now being taken to turn this ferment into a 
healthy process of restoration of the common- 
wealth? We have talked so much of reconstruc- 



98 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

tion that the word has lost its sharpness, but have 
we done anything to justify that word? A certain 
amount of very necessary patching is being accom- 
plished, for example in the training and "re-educa- 
tion" of disabled soldiers. But what of reconstruc- 
tion in the wider sense? Where are the architects 
and the masons and the hodmen for this new build- 
ing of which we speak? There is an accredited 
story that the walls of Jericho fell at the blast of 
trumpets, but these new walls will not rise to the 
trumpeting of our orators. If they rise at all, it 
will be in the sweat of our brows, through the 
labor of our hands. 

The time is ripe for thinking of these thing9. 
The war has stimulated social and economic forces 
of the most opposite character, some fraught with 
the gravest danger for the coming era, others 
bearing the promise of a fairer age. The finest 
opportunity for constructive citizenship ever of- 
fered to the world has now come. The end of 
the war has shifted to another sphere the struggle 
between the forces of reaction and of progress. 
There is much ground for hope : the breaking of 
the chains of tradition that bind men to evil lest 



THE CRISIS 99 

their good be also disturbed; the widening of the 
idea of service and responsibility so that the na- 
tion has been revealed as a single great interde- 
pendent, and the relation of nations as a vital 
concern of the members of each; the awakening 
of men, in the sight of an old order war-destroyed, 
to the possibility and the urgency of building 
anew; and even the sense of overwhelming war- 
indebtedness which challenges men, by its insist- 
ence, to face, to attack, and happily to overthrow 
the institutional causes of poverty itself. But 
there is also much room for fear. , The habit of 
despotic, practically uncontrolled, power which 
governments acquire in war may persist perni- 
ciously in peace. The federation of commercial 
and industrial corporations into national unities 
may lead, in the contest for world markets, to new 
forms of competitive struggle at least as sinister 
and demoralizing as the old, the plea of national 
interest being effectively substituted for the in- 
dividualistic arguments of older days. ( Men may 
still, for all their experience of war, cherish the 
delusion that the vices of individuals may be the 
virtues of nations.) Or these same giants, finan- 
cial, commercial, and industrial, may, by their in- 



ioo LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

fluence over public opinion and their political as- 
cendency, pervert the reconstruction to serve the 
narrow ends of pride and power and possession, 
aims merely cumulative and soulless. And there 
are perils of the after-war spirit, of the reaction 
from the exhausting strain, of the unnaturalness 
of a world whose young men, at the age of gen- 
erous enterprise and initiative so badly needed 
now, have passed, those not consumed by the 
flames, through the decivilizing furnace of war. 

Never was it more necessary that men should 
know what they seek, and the conditions under 
which its attainment is possible. No man sets 
about constructing a house or a ship or a ma- 
chine without a clear plan and also a clear pur- 
pose. But many men think they can "reconstruct" 
society without either. There should in fact be 
a reconstruction period as definitely as there was 
a war period. Just as definitely as we devoted 
ourselves to war, so should we devote ourselves 
to reconstruction that the great lessons of the 
former period may not fade away from our minds 
and leave us where we were. 

Is reconstruction, as some seem to think, merely 
the provision of employment for those left 



THE CRISIS 101 

stranded by the cessation of war? Is it merely 
expansion, trade development, new markets? Is 
it merely the increase of productivity and the pay- 
ing of war debt? Is it merely the settling down, 
with as little disturbance as possible, to the old 
order which the war broke through? Shall all 
that travail, all that sacrifice, all that heart-search- 
ing move us to nothing more than the quickest 
return to the old order of life? Besides busi- 
ness as before, shall we have poverty as before, 
insecurity as before, misery as before, inefficiency 
as before, maleducation as before, and with these, 
as not before, the growing temper of revolution? 

There can be no reconstruction worth the name 
unless we succeed in widening for all men, and 
especially for the workers, the opportunity to live 
a reasonable life: unless we can remove the in- 
sistent economic menaces that embitter and de- 
grade the existence of multitudes, and unless we 
can also develop those wider interests, those cul- 
tural and spiritual interests, without which life is 
a mere scramble for material things. 

Here is the standard by which we should judge 
the variety of programs offered to us in the name 
of reconstruction. Trade expansion? Assured- 



ioa LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

ly, but let not the plea be heard that just for the 
sake of competing abroad we must submit to low 
wages and excessive hours at home. That plea 
will be raised in every land, and who then will 
profit? Science in industry? Yes, that is abso- 
lutely necessary to succeed but unless we add to 
it the science of human relationship we shall de- 
lude ourselves with specious gains. Increased pro- 
ductivity? Yes, without greater productivity we 
are wasting part of our strength, squandering our 
resources, convicting ourselves of unintelligence. 
But let us so increase productivity that we do not 
in the process sacrifice the producer to the product. 
In the first half of the nineteenth century during 
and after the Napoleonic wars Britain increased 
her productivity to an extraordinary degree, but 
perhaps never was a great free people more im- 
poverished, more disgracefully oppressed, more 
endangered in morals and in health. The first 
half of the twentieth century must not reflect that 
tale. Technical education? Yes, we are still be- 
hind in this respect. A great effort must be made 
to improve it, but let us at the same time make it 
the means to provide the leisure and the opportu- 



THE CRISIS 103 

nity for the wide education which adds to the 
meaning of life. 

That is the test, the test of the common wel- 
fare, which we must apply to the various pro- 
grams so lavishly offered us today in the name of 
reconstruction. Attempts are again being made to 
divert attention from these issues by appealing to 
mere external rivalries, to the economic forms 
of that international competition which has been 
so ruinous to the world. The blatant appeals 
of false patriotism are again being put forward 
to turn men's thoughts from what true patriotism 
most demands, the internal reordering of our 
economic life so as to provide the secure basis for 
true national greatness in a civilization whose 
ideals need no longer be perverted, or left un- 
realized, because of the menace of external foes. 
If such appeals succeed, if the patriotism of peace, 
because of the weakness of the imaginations of 
men, cannot evoke the will and courage devoted 
to the patriotism of war, then the most auspicious- 
ly pregnant hour of the industrial age must pass 
without delivering its birth. 



CHAPTER VII 

INDUSTRIAL RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN : 
PLANS AND PROPOSALS 

The British Labor Party on the "New Social Or- 
der." The national minimum wage. The 
democratic control of industry. The prob- 
lem of taxation. The surplus for the com- 
mon good. 

The Whitley Report. Its origin. The 
progress of joint industrial councils, national 
and district, and workshop committees. Shall 
the councils become lawmakers? The inade- 
quacy of the "cash-nexus." Reception of the 
plan. Reflection on the chances of success. 



The sense of the need of reconstruction is more 

acute in the forward-looking circles of Great 

Britain than in those of America. The sense of 

the need — not the need itself, which, as I shall try 

to show later, is, with us, while different, no less 

great. We are more complacent for the most 

part, but needs are not to be measured by com- 

104 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 105 

placencies, which indeed may often be but an ag- 
gravation of any problem or an additional ob- 
stacle to its solution. Wherefore the plans and 
proposals now being so actively forwarded in 
Britain may well serve us, not necessarily as a 
model, but at least as an incentive. In Britain, 
plans are being laid on so great a scale, steps 
are being taken of such a far-reaching kind, that, 
whatever their ultimate success or fate, they must 
assume a place in the history of civilization itself. 
While numerous bodies, official and unofficial, 
have been giving thought to the subject, two pro- 
grams, that of the British Labor Party and that 
of the Government, are of outstanding significance. 
In this matter the lead has undoubtedly come from 
labor — naturally, because it is labor which suffers 
most and first from lack of forethought. There 
is, besides, a certain irony in the present situation 
so far as labor is concerned. The time of its 
power in the conflict of labor and capital was the 
very time when the exercise of that power would 
bring most danger to the common cause. Its 
time of power is when labor is in most demand, 
its time of weakness when labor is over-plentiful. 
The former condition is found in time of war, 



106 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

the latter is the natural immediate consequence 
of the return of peace. Is it surprising that or- 
ganized labor should have been looking forward 
anxiously to the morrow? But the perils against 
which it would guard and the provision which 
it would make are things which concern us all. 

The chief statement of the views of labor in 
Great Britain is the manifesto entitled "Labor 
and the New Social Order." As originally is- 
sued, it was not the accepted program of the La- 
bor Party, but a draft prepared by a sub-commit- 
tee for submission to a general conference. But 
there can be little doubt that in essentials it ex- 
presses the general attitude of British labor. It 
is a very remarkable document, alike in its spirit 
and its specific proposals, and deserves the careful 
consideration of all who really believe in recon- 
struction. In what follows I shall try to illus- 
trate its spirit and summarize its main proposals. 
I am not here suggesting that the measures it ad- 
vocates are suitable under our conditions — what 
these may be we shall reserve for later considera- 
tion — but I do firmly believe that the conviction 
of the necessity of cooperative action and of in- 
telligent daring which it displays is a spirit we 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 107 

would do well to emulate in seeking a solution to 
the problems which confront ourselves. These 
qaulities have never been more finely displayed 
than in this document. They are qualities which 
even those who find most to differ from must 
recognize and admire. 

The manifesto begins by proclaiming a policy 
of "Thorough." "What this war is consuming 
is not merely the security, the homes, the liveli- 
hood and the lives of millions of innocent fami- 
lies, and an enormous proportion of all the ac- 
cumulated wealth of the world, but also the very 
basis of the peculiar order in which it has arisen. 
The individualist system of#capitalistic production 
based on the private ownership and competitive 
administration of land and capital, with its reck- 
less 'profiteering' and wage-slavery; with its glori- 
fication of the unhampered struggle for the means 
of life, and its hypocritical pretense of the 'sur- 
vival of the fittest' ; with the monstrous inequality 
of circumstances which it produces and the degra- 
dation and the brutalization, both moral and 
spiritual, resulting therefrom, may, we hope, in- 
deed have received a death blow." Unless we 
beware, it will be the death-blow of Western civi- 



108 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

lization, since it is easier to slip into ruin than 
to progress into higher forms of organization. 
The new social order cannot be built "in a year 
or two of feverish 'Reconstruction'," but plans 
can be drafted and foundations laid. "The four 
pillars of the house that we propose to erect, 
resting on the common foundation of the demo- 
cratic control of society in all its activities, may 
be termed: 

(a) The Universal Enforcement of a National 

Minimum ; 

(b) The Democratic Control of Industry; 

(c) The Revolution in National Finance; and 

(d) The Surplus Wealth for the Common 

Good." 
Each of these principles is explained and de- 
fended in turn. The argument for the first we 
can perhaps summarize in the words of Bernard 
Shaw: "Until the community is organized in 
such a way that the fear of bodily want is forgot- 
ten as completely as the fear of wolves already 
is in civilized capitals, we shall never have a decent 
social life." The minimum at the then existing 
level of prices is suggested as not less than 30/ a 
week ( about $7.50, but we must remember that the 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 109 

purchasing power of money in England fell con- 
siderably after the date at which the Report was 
drafted. A minimum wage on so broad a scale 
would of course disorganize the present system of 
employment, and a short discussion of the whole 
employment question follows. The proper method 
of demobilization is suggested (it is fully discussed 
in another labor document), and then the general 
question of "securing employment for all" is taken 
up. The principle is laid down uncompromisingly 
that to provide suitable employment for the men 
and women it called away to war-occupations rests 
upon the Government, being a national obliga- 
tion that should not be handed over either to pri- 
vate benevolent societies or to the military authori- 
ties. It is suggested that in this matter the ut- 
most use should be made of the trade unions and 
professional organizations. Should the demands 
of ordinary industry be inadequate in the years 
of transition, ways in which socially useful and 
honorable employment may be provided are con- 
sidered, including (a) rehousing on a very large 
scale, (b) building of schools, training colleges, 
technical colleges, &c, and the provision of ade- 
quate staffs for these; (c) new roads, (d) light 



no LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

railways, (e) unification and reorganization of 
the railway and canal system, (f) afforestacion, 
(g) land reclamation, (h) harbor and port de- 
velopment, (i) "the opening up of access to land 
by cooperative small holdings and in other prac- 
ticable ways." With these are coupled sugges- 
tions on the lines, though going beyond them, of 
the New English Education Act. Lastly a 
scheme of social insurance against unemployment 
is outlined. 

The difficult question of the "democratic con- 
trol of industry" is next taken up. It is through- 
out a plea for cooperative organization as against 
wasteful competitive disorganization. "What 
the nation needs is undoubtedly a great bound on- 
ward in its aggregate productivity." Let those 
who think that labor obstinately and maliciously 
prefers to diminish output reflect upon these 
words. To this end a plea is made for the im- 
mediate nationalization of the whole transporta- 
tion system, in fact for a "united national service 
of communication and transport," as well as of 
mines and of electrical plants. The argument fot 
the last-mentioned is of interest as showing the 
attitude of British labor towards scientific develop- 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN in 

merit. "What is called for immediately after 
the war is the erection of a score of gigantic 
'super-power stations,' which could generate, at 
incredibly cheap rates, enough electricity for the 
use of every industrial establishment and every 
private household in Great Britain, the present 
municipal and joint stock electrical plants being 
universally linked up and used for local distribu- 
tion. This is inevitably the future of electricity." 
All this is put forward as only a first installment 
of the "democratic control" at which the party 
aims. What the report says under this heading 
of the war-time control of industry is specially 
significant. "The people will be extremely fool- 
ish if they ever allow their indispensable indus- 
tries to slip back into the unfettered control of 
private capitalists, who are, actually at the instance 
of the Government itself, now rapidly combining, 
trade by trade, into monopolist trusts, which may 
presently become as ruthless in their extortion 
as the worst American examples. Standing as it 
does for the Democratic Control of Industry, the 
Labor Party would think twice before it sanc- 
tioned any abandonment of the present profitable 
centralization of purchase of raw material; of 



ii2 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

the present carefully organized 'rationing,' by 
joint committees of the trades concerned, of the 
several establishments with the materials they re- 
quire ; of the present elaborate system of 'costing' 
and public audit of manufacturers' accounts, so as 
to stop the waste heretofore caused by the mechan- 
ical inefficiency of the more backward iirms; of 
the present salutary publicity of manufacturing 
processes and expenses thereby ensured; and, on 
the information thus obtained (in order never 
again to revert to the old-time profiteering) of 
the present rigid fixing, for standardized prod- 
ucts, of maximum prices at the factory, at the 
warehouse of the wholesale trader, and in the re- 
tail shop." 

It is noticeable that this program leans further 
to unqualified State socialism than one might have 
expected from the growth in Great Britain of the 
idea of "industrial autonomy." State control 
should never be regarded as synonymous with 
"industrial democracy," but, apart from one or 
two very incidental references to joint control, 
there is nothing in this section of the report to 
suggest that they are not identical. The "effec- 
tive personal freedom" for which it pleads is not 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 113 

spontaneously generated in industry through gov- 
ernment ownership and control; in fact the con- 
trary is the case, unless, as never before, decen- 
tralization and direct participation of the employe 
in management is assured. How to attain these 
necessary conditions of the "democratic control 
of industry" is lightly passed over in this other- 
wise so trenchant report. In this respect the re- 
port bears witness to the draughtsmanship of a 
distinguished "Fabian" author who has always 
leaned more to centralization than to "effective 
freedom." 

Next the now tremendous problem of taxation 
is envisaged. "For the raising of the greater part 
of the revenue now required the Labor Party 
looks to the direct taxation of the incomes above 
the necessary cost of family maintenance; and, 
for the requisite effort to pay off the national 
debt, to the direct taxation of private fortunes 
both during life and at death." It is claimed, 
not without justification, that direct taxation a9 
against indirect is in accord with "the very defi- 
nite teachings of economic science." It is here, 
too, that the claim is made of the common inter- 



ii 4 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

est which the artisan has with four-fifths of the 
nation. 

Finally, the Report deals with those forms of 
economic "surplus" which long ago attracted the 
attention of the economic theorist and have more 
recently become at once the instigation and the 
object of attack of the social reformer. "We 
have allowed the riches of our mines, the rental 
value of the lands superior to the margin of culti- 
vation, the extra profits of the fortunate capital- 
ists, even the material outcome of scientific dis- 
coveries — which ought by now to have made this 
Britain of ours immune from class poverty or 
from any widespread destitution — to be absorbed 
by individual proprietors; and then devoted very 
largely to the senseless luxury of an idle rich 
class." This surplus is to be secured for the com- 
munity. Out of it comes — as indeed it must come 
— the new capital which the community needs for 
the carrying out of enterprises. From this also 
must be directly defrayed the cost of the condi- 
tions of communal welfare, education, recreation, 
social insurance, public provision for the sick and 
the infirm, the aged and the victims of accident 
and disease. "From the same source must come 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 115 

the greatly increased public provision that the 
Labor Party will insist on being made for scien- 
tific investigation and original research, in every 
branch of knowledge, not to say also for the pro- 
motion of music, literature and fine art, which 
have been under capitalism so greatly neglected, 
and upon which, so the Labor Party holds, any 
real development of civilization fundamentally de- 
pends. Society, like the individual, does not live 
by bread alone." And the document concludes 
with the remarkable words: "If law is the 
mother of freedom, science, to the Labor Party, 
must be the parent of law." 

It is interesting to reflect how impossible it 
would have been for such words to have emanated 
from British labor, then outlawed and unorgan- 
ized, a hundred years ago. While to many of 
us, habituated to more near-thoughted courses and 
restrained by attendant timidities and scruples, 
these proposals may appear extreme, it is most 
instructive to contrast them in this regard with 
the destructive denunciations which emanate from 
Marxian socialism. The comparison illumines 
the distinction drawn in Chapter IV between the 
narrowed and the widened views of labor. Here 



u6 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

is the first great triumph of the widened view. 
The Marxist policy contemplates a reversed domi- 
nation of class over class, but the policy of this 
Labor Party is professedly national in the best 
sense. It more than once repudiates the sugges- 
tion that its program is a "class" program, and in- 
deed no program can fairly be so described, though 
inevitably it would alter class relations and modify 
class privileges, if men are striving honestly there- 
by for the "building up of the community as a 
whole." 

II 

Not less significant, though naturally more re- 
stricted in their sweep, are the new plans for in- 
dustrial reform made or adopted by the British 
Government. Where labor "gets busy" we may 
expect government to "get busy," too. I do 
not propose to describe here the various policies 
projected to meet the crisis, but one of these is 
so simple, so comprehensive, and, as a government 
program, so novel, that it offers an experiment of 
world-wide interest. It is designed to solve the 
hardest industrial problem of all, the establish- 
ment of a better system of relations between em- 






RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 117 

ployers and employed. This is the already fa- 
mous "Whitley plan." 

A sub-committee of the Reconstruction Com- 
mittee was appointed to consider the question of 
better industrial relations. It was composed of 
certain representatives of employers and em- 
ployes respectively, some professed economists, 
and a few others who were in touch with the situ- 
ation, including two women. This body, in spite 
of its mixed character, issued a unanimous report, 
now named, after the chairman of the Commit- 
tee, the Whitley Report. 1 It is delightfully 
and strategically short, no more than an outline 
of the general organization which must exist to 
ensure the application of certain broad principles 
to industry. These principles had already found 
some advocacy. They had recently been put for- 
ward explicitly by a master builder of London, 
Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, under the form of an "in- 
dustrial parliament" to regulate his own trade. 
They had actually been put into application in the 
Painters' and Decorators' branch of that trade, 
with distinct success as it appeared. They had 

1 More correctly, the First Interim Report, on Joint Stand- 
ing Industrial Councils, of the Subcommittee on Relations be- 
tween Employers and Employes. 



n8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

been recommended by the Commission on "Labor 
Unrest in Great Britain," whose findings lay be- 
fore the Whitley Committee. One of the general 
conclusions of that Commission ran thus : "Labor 
should take part in the affairs of the community as 
partners rather than as servants." 

The new plan is introduced as follows: "In 
the interests of the community it is vital that after 
the war the cooperation of all classes, established 
during the war, should continue, and more es- 
pecially with regard to the relations between em- 
ployers and employed. For securing improve- 
ment in the latter, it is essential that any proposals 
put forward should offer to work people the means 
of attaining improved conditions of employment 
and a higher standard of comfort generally, and 
involve the enlistment of their active and continu- 
ous cooperation in the promotion of industry. 

"To this end, the establishment for each indus- 
try of an organization, representative of employ- 
ers and workpeople, to have as its object the regu- 
lar consideration of matters affecting the progress 
and wellbeing of trade from the point of view of 
all those engaged in it, so far as this is consist- 
ent with the general interest of the community, 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 119 

appears to us necessary." The plan suggested 
consists of a system of "joint standing industrial 
councils in the several industries, composed of 
representatives of employers and employed." 
These national councils would have very wide 
competence, not only in, respect of immediate 
questions of demobilization and the restoration 
of industry, but also in respect of the permanent 
problems of industrial welfare, conditions of em- 
ployment, adjustment of wages, removal of dis- 
putes, provision of technical training, of industrial 
research, improvement of processes, protection 
of workers in the matters of earnings and em- 
ployment, safeguarding of their rights in the in- 
ventions and improvements they may discover and 
so on. The national councils would be supple- 
mented by district councils and workshop com- 
mittees, also composed of representatives of both 
sides, to deal with subordinate questions and 
special applications of general policy. 

Two further paragraphs of the Report are very 
significant "It appears to us," say the Commit- 
tee, "that it may be desirable at some later stage 
for the State to give the sanction of law to agree- 
ments made by the councils, but the initiative in 



120 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

this direction should come from the councils them- 
selves." The importance of this statement has 
scarcely been recognized. The industrial coun- 
cils are conceived as potentially law-making bodies. 
This goes right in the face of the accredited theory 
of territorial sovereignty, indivisibly centered in 
one all-competent (and therefore all-incompetent) 
parliament. It is a direct approach to the princi- 
ple of degrees and kinds of sovereignty, so ably 
advocated by a rising school of political scientists, 
and in particular applied to industry by the guild 
socialists. (The latter, it is true, will have noth- 
ing to do with the Whitley plan, having their rea- 
sons for not believing that "half a loaf is better 
than no bread".) The application of this idea 
would be a wedge in the principle of centralized 
government, and is in harmony with the growing 
conviction that central parliaments and cabinets 
are overworked and underspecialized, and inade- 
quate to the enormous complexity of modern in- 
dustry. 

The other paragraph says: "We are con- 
vinced that a permanent improvement in the rela- 
tions between employers and employed must be 
founded upon something other than a cash basis. 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 121 

What is wanted is that the workpeople should 
have a greater opportunity of participating in the 
discussion about and adjustment of those parts of 
industry by which they are most affected." The 
"cash-nexus," as Carlyle called it, will never bring 
peace between the warring parties, and it is well 
for human nature that this is so. The general 
failure of "profit-sharing" schemes bears out this 
truth. The cash-nexus will never bring content- 
edness to labor, so long as it is excluded from a 
voice in the determination of its fate, so long as 
it is merely a hireling. 

The Whitley Report was adopted without de- 
lay by the Government. It sent copies to the vari- 
ous trade-unions and employers' associations, re- 
questing their views, and the replies, from the 
great majority on both sides, were very favor- 
able. The British Minister of Labor issued a 
circular on the subject, stating that the national 
councils are to be recognized as "official standing 
Consultative Committees on all future questions 
affecting the industries which they represent," and 
that they will constitute the "normal channel 
through which the experience of an industry will 
be sought on all questions with which the indus- 



122 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

try is concerned" The Government is undoubt- 
edly in earnest in its acceptance of the plan. 
What seems to impress the Government most is the 
advantage which accrues from its being able to 
deal directly with a single organization represent- 
ing a whole industry, instead of with a number of 
crossing and conflicting authorities. The exist- 
ence of these new organizations would have 
greatly eased its problem of harnessing industry 
for war, and it contemplates that their establish- 
ment will greatly aid its work in the period of re- 
adjustment. Accordingly it has set itself to pro- 
mote the formation of these councils. At first 
the process of establishment was slow, but 
latterly considerable progress has been made. In 
a number of industries, including the building 
trades, the furniture trade, the heavy chemicals 
industry, the rubber manufacturing industry, the 
baking industry, and others, the councils are al* 
ready in full operation. 

A remarkable development along similar lines, 
forming a crown to the Whitley plan, is the pro- 
posed National Industrial Council unanimously 
recommended by a most representative Joint Com- 
mittee of English labor leaders and employers, to 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 123 

be a general parliament for all industry, "to secure 
the largest possible measure of joint action be- 
tween the representative organizations of employ- 
ers and workpeople, and to be the normal channel 
through which the opinion and the experience of 
industry will be sought by the Government on all 
questions affecting industry as a whole." 

The application of the Whitley plan is a crucial 
experiment in industry. Its success or failure will 
profoundly affect all future developments. It 
proposes a via media between the existing auto- 
cratic control and such revolutionary systems as 
either the new or the older socialism advocates. 
What then, on the brink of this experiment, can 
we surmise about its chances of success? 

The plan, though not revolutionary, is in con- 
trast with the existing order radical. This at any 
rate is the first condition of success. Whether 
in fear from a forecast of the chaos that will 
otherwise ensue, or in hope from a vision of a bet- 
ter industrial order than we have known before, 
all men with any claim to statesmanship perceive 
the need of a new understanding, a new relation- 
ship in industry. Of course there are always with 
us the "practical men" who speak of all such 



124 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

plans as "ideal" and "visionary." The motto of 
such people is that what has not been cannot be. 
Every day something happens to give them the lie, 
but they still repeat, with perfect composure, their 
ancient formulae. They have been repeating them 
since the Stone Age, and if other men had listened, 
the world would still be in the Stone Age. Least 
of all does it become the leaders of labor to echo 
that parrot cry, for all that labor has so far gained 
was first scouted as "impractical." 

Again, the plan is definitely based upon the ex- 
isting organization of labor as of capital. This is 
made particularly explicit in the later explanatory 
reports of the Committee, which refuse to recom- 
mend the establishment of Whitley Councils for 
industries lacking adequate union organization. 
This important provision differentiates the Whit- 
ley plan from such methods of organization as the 
Rockefeller plan. It is a wise recognition of the 
fact that labor organization is a necessary founda- 
tion of industrial order, and that no scheme of 
bringing labor and capital together can be expected 
to succeed which cuts across or in any degree de- 
flects the allegiance of the worker to unionism. 

Such little experience as there is of the working 






RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 125 

of a scheme of this kind appears so far to justify 
the hopes of its promoters. Where it has been 
already applied, as in the decorators' industry 
in Great Britain, it is stated to have induced a 
spirit of harmony and cooperation unknown be- 
fore. The general favor which the plan has re- 
ceived alike from employers and employes is a 
good augury. We must bear in mind that em- 
ployers and employes together are bound up in 
a system for which neither can be held responsible, 
that many of the former too would gladly break 
its fetters, and that the waste, material and human, 
of the system, is disadvantageous to the majority 
of both classes. 

It would, however, be unwise to expect too 
much from this single scheme. Perhaps part of 
the welcome accorded to the Report is due to its 
generality. It is not difficult to discover causes 
of disagreement which may appear within the 
councils. The fundamental differences of inter- 
est between capital and labor as at present consti- 
tuted are not abolished by bringing them together 
in permanent joint consultation, or even joint di- 
rection. Over these fundamental differences the 
Whitley scheme throws no bridge whatever. For 



ia6 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

we must always remember that the profounder 
problem is not the relation of the management 
as such to employes as such. That exists under 
cooperative as much as under "capitalistic" pro- 
duction. The profounder problem is one of dis- 
tribution not of production. It is one, not of re- 
lation of employer to employe, but of capital to 
labor. It is the problem of the relation of profits, 
interest, and rent to wages. So long as the capi- 
talist regards labor as a necessary cost, so long 
as the worker regards interest, rent, and profits as 
deductions from the wealth which he creates, that 
unsettled question is a flaming sword which cleaves 
their interests apart. This is not a condemnation 
of the Whitley plan, but a statement of its per- 
haps inevitable limitations. 

In this connection it is well to note that, while 
the interim reports of the Whitley Committee 
were unanimous, the final report reveals a distinct 
cleavage of opinion on a fundamental issue. Five 
members of the Committee, out of the fifteen who 
sign the Report, do so subject to a certain reser- 
vation. They say: "By attaching our signa- 
tures to the general reports we desire to render 
hearty support to the recommendations that In- 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 127 

dustrial Councils or Trade Boards, according to 
whichever are the more suitable in the circum- 
stances, should be established for the several in- 
dustries or businesses, and that these bodies, repre- 
sentative of employers and employed, should con- 
cern themselves with the establishment of mini- 
mum conditions and the furtherance of the com- 
mon interests of their trades. 

"But while recognizing that the more amicable 
relations thus established between capital and la- 
bor will afford an atmosphere generally favorable 
to industrial peace and progress, we desire to ex- 
press our view that a complete identity of inter- 
ests between capital and labor cannot be thus ef- 
fected, and that such machinery cannot be expected 
to furnish a settlement for the more serious con- 
flicts or interest involved in the working of an 
economic system primarily governed and directed 
by motives of private profit." 

There are numerous minor difficulties involved 
in the constitution of the councils, in the selection 
of representatives, in the determination of the 
powers of the joint boards, and so on. It looks 
as if the basis of national councils must first be 
laid by the establishment of the "Works Com- 



128 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

mittee," and it is significant that the Whitley 
Committee is turning its attention more especially 
in that direction. The report recently issued on 
"Works Committees" by the British Ministry of 
Labor is most illuminating. It reveals the wide 
variety and range, the great need and service, 
but also the serious difficulties of these boards. 
One of these difficulties is the relation of the 
Works Committee to the trade-unions, which dare 
not allow themselves to be weakened by this new 
authority. Another is the assignment of powers 
to them — are they merely consultative or can 
they have any direct share in the actual manage- 
ment of works? "It would appear," says the re- 
port in question, "that the functions of a Works 
Committee are practically always consultative. 
Usually a Works Committee can bring matters 
before the management and discuss them with the 
management; it can press its views about these 
matters on the management; in the last report, it 
can induce the Trade Union organization to call 
a strike. But the Works Committee cannot 
usually, as such, carry its views into action, or 
ensure that they shall be carried into action, by 
any direct machinery. The management has the 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 129 

executive power, and unless the management is 
impressed by the representations of the members 
of the committee, or by the sanction that lies be- 
hind them, those representations will not lead to 
executive action. This would appear to be usual 
even where the Works Committee is a Joint Com- 
mittee. There are, indeed, certain cases in which 
the decision of a majority of the members of such 
a Joint Committee is carried into effect. This is 
so in the Pit-head and certain other committees 
which have the power to fine bad time-keepers; 
and in certain engineering establishments the 
question of prosecuting bad time-keepers before 
the Munitions Tribunal is decided by Joint Works 
Committees. But so far as can be discovered, 
the general custom is to the contrary. Unanimity 
must be attained; the management must be con- 
vinced, and both sides must freely agree together, 
before executive action is taken. The operation 
of a Joint Committee is really in the nature of 
consultation between two parties — consultation 
which, if it result in unanimity, results in action, 
but not otherwise. It would be a mistake to think 
in terms of voting, or to think that even if there 
ia voting, its result is a formal decision by a ma- 



130 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

jority vote. What happens is rather discussion 
by which misunderstanding is often removed and 
upon which, if unanimity is attained between the 
two sides, action will ensue. It follows, there- 
fore, that generally we cannot speak of Joint Com- 
mittees, if by Joint Committees we understand 
joint executive councils acting by the vote of the 
majority. On the other hand there are Joint 
Committees, if by Joint Committees we under- 
stand deliberate meetings of both sides, always 
attended by both sides, though often accompanied 
by separate meetings of the two sides" (pp. 27-8). 
Another difficult question is the relation of the 
joint committee to the workers' committees now 
growing common in British industry — which will 
succeed better, a regular joint board or a commit- 
tee of workers having regular access to the man- 
agement? The latter is the general practice, and 
seems to be more in accordance with the present 
stage of industrial development. Perhaps the 
most serious of all these practical difficulties is 
the position and security of the chosen representa- 
tives of the workers in their new relation to the 
management. The Report on Works Commit- 
tees contains a working miner's statement on the 



RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN Ri 

subject which is worth quoting for the light it 
throws upon the workers' own interpretation of 
the difficulty in this particular industry. Refer- 
ring to the work of the mining "output commit- 
tees," he says: "The rules give the men a voice 
in the management, but I am sorry to say there is 
no Committee strong enough to administer the 
rules as it relates to management: they go so far 
but stop as they see an invisible pressure being 
brought upon them which is going to affect the 
security of their living, a kind of victimization 
which you cannot prove. Your contracting place 
is finished and you want another place, but the 
management sends you 'odding' ; you are middle- 
aged and you cannot keep pace with the younger 
element; and you look after a fresh place, but 
everywhere is full up ; and when you come out of 
the office you can see other men set on. This is 
what is going on all around the district, and you 
want to strengthen these men by having the rules 
enacted by Act of Parliament to make them bind- 
ing; and if cases like this happen, there wants to 
be a Tribunal appointed by Government, repre- 
sentative of all classes so that a man shall have 
a fair hearing and equality of justice; this will 



i 3 2 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

give him a security and it will reduce this insecur- 
ity of work." (Pp. 1 19-120.) 

These serious difficulties may be, as already in 
some cases they have been, overcome, where both 
sides are in earnest in participating in the scheme. 
What emerges most clearly is the necessity for 
such committees under the new conditions of in- 
dustry. It is noteworthy that as conditions grow 
more complex, as, for example, piece-work in en- 
gineering takes increasingly the place of time- 
work, the establishment of Workers' Commit- 
tees is found necessary. Here is one agency 
whereby the rigor of trade-union uniformity may 
be by consent and under safeguard mitigated, and 
the ironic necessity dispelled which causes labor 
to resist the increase, through the applications of 
science, of the means whereby it lives. 

This much appears to me to be certain, that 
the Report is based on principles which must, in 
this way or another, be applied if industrial rela- 
tions are to be improved; and that, whatever its 
later fate, the adoption of this scheme can be of 
the greatest service in tiding over the first peril- 
ous transition period after the war. 



CHAPTER VIII 

LIONS IN THE PATH 

Forces in the established order which oppose 
beneficent change. The individualistic tradi- 
tion of the law. Anachronistic attitude to- 
wards competition. The courts in relation 
to labor. 

The entrenched power of consolidated 
wealth. The economic oligarchy and the 
economic system. Control over the political 
machine and over the agencies of public 
opinion. 

I 

Any new order of industry, through which the 
human wastefulness of the present order can be 
removed, must involve a serious disturbance of es- 
tablished interests. It is well to understand the 
difficulties blocking the line of advance. In this 
brief survey, these can be suggested rather than 
described, and there is danger, in a summary re- 
view, of wrong emphasis and too sweeping judg- 
ments. But it is in full view of these difficulties 

i33 



134 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

that any successful efforts towards reconstruction 
must be made. 

There are certain assumptions underlying the 
argument which it is well to make explicit. I 
assume in the first place that any system which 
gives to any class or section or interest, large or 
small, uncontrolled power over others, is danger- 
ous to the commonwealth. I assume that the 
progress of civilization depends upon, and has al- 
ways been marked by, the emancipation from arbi- 
trary control of those hitherto subject to it, not 
because the latter are superior in any sense, but 
because a relation of servitude is inherently evil, 
perverting the human quality of either side. I 
assume that wealth and poverty are inter-related 
and socially conditioned. I assume that irre- 
sponsible wealth, in its upliftedness and superfluity, 
is pernicious to the possessor and to those his 
wealth commands; and that all essential poverty, 
in its dejectedness and deprivation, in its denuda- 
tion of opportunity, and in its diseaseful fecundity, 
is an evil not only to the poor but to the whole 
community. I assume that any reordering of so- 
ciety which mitigated the extremes of inequality 
would, if safeguarded from social reactions of 



LIONS IN THE PATH 135 

a harmful nature, lead to a better utilization of 
that wealth and to the greater happiness of man- 
kind. I assume finally that in the present break- 
ing system labor is in general a subject class, and 
that many of the children of labor are deprived, 
by economic necessity, of the opportunity to de- 
velop, for their own and the common good, their 
natural powers. 

These assumptions imply no comparison, for 
better or worse, of class with class, no condemna- 
tion of one class nor exaltation of another. They 
do imply the indictment of a system, in so far as, 
in the growing consciousness of its character of 
good and evil, it is seen to be not inevitable but 
capable of reform. What is most clearly evil in 
it, and I believe most amenable to change, is the 
relation of dominance and subservience with all 
the waste that this entails. There are naturally 
certain strong influences in the established order 
which act to maintain that relation. These are the 
lions on the path. 

Every established order seeks, though always in 
the long run vainly, to immobilize itself. It 
stereotypes customs into institutions, and fash- 
ions supporting modes of thought into laws and 



136 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

precedents and forms of education. It subtly con- 
verts to its service the most spiritual forces, 
philosophy and religion, and enlists — though these 
are first to break away — the most liberating and 
creating forces, literature and art. By power it 
wins prestige, then turns its prestige into the 
foundation of its power. Thus alike for the good 
and the evil in it, it bids for immortality. 

The first bulwark of all order is the "law of 
the land." It not only prescribes the form of 
order which regulates society, it breathes a spirit. 
In America that spirit is distinctly hostile to the 
spirit which is shaping the new labor situation. 

"The great and chief end of men's uniting 
into commonwealths, and putting themselves un- 
der government, is the preservation of their 
property." So wrote Locke in his classical 
treatise on government. It was an expression of 
the frankly materialistic individualism of a bygone 
age which yet lives on in the American courts and 
most wonderfully in the American Constitution. 
It is at war with the ideal of labor in two vital 
respects, for it places property above persons* 
and it venerates the competitive principle. A few 
illustrations must here suffice by way of justifica- 



LIONS IN THE PATH 137 

tion for these statements. The attitude of law 
towards property is seen perhaps most luminously 
in the principle and practice of the injunction, the 
characteristic modern development of the old 
legal doctrine of conspiracy. An injunction is ex- 
pressly issued to protect property against threat- 
ened danger. This danger may of course arise 
from a strike, more especially as market expect- 
ancies become recognized as "property," and the 
courts have issued a vast number of injunctions 
with reference to strikes, showing quite clearly 
that they viewed these disputes solely from the 
point of view of the property involved and not 
at all as a conflict of claims by which some in- 
direct property loss (often negligible compared 
with the direct loss sustained by the non-proper- 
tied) is merely an incidental consequence. The 
tremendous range of the injunction was well illus- 
trated in the Buck's Stove and Range case, which 
enjoined "the officers of the American Federa- 
tion of Labor, officers and members of affiliated 
unions, agents, friends, sympathizers, counsel, 
conspirators and co-conspirators from making any 
reference whatever to the fact that the Buck's 
Company had ever been in any dispute with labor, 



i 3 8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

or to the fact that the Company had ever been re- 
garded as unfair, had ever been on any unfair 
list, or on a 'we don't patronize' list of the Ameri- 
can Federation of Labor or of any other organiza- 
tion, and also prohibited any person from either 
directly or indirectly referring to any such con- 
troversy by printed, written or spoken word." 
The vast scope of the injunction in the "blanket" 
form, its potency to arrest otherwise legitimate 
activities during its continuance, the efficacy of 
the punishment for "contempt" which follows its 
violation, and the inability to obtain juries in such 
cases, have combined to make the injunction, un- 
der the present constitution of the courts, one of 
the most formidable enemies of a new industrial 
order. If further proof of this claim were 
needed, it has been provided by the recent decision 
of the Supreme Court in the case of the Hitchman 
Coal and Coke Company. 

The law would hold the industrial arena clear 
for competition. Whatever is in restraint of 
trade falls under its ban. Anachronistically it at- 
tempts to stem the onward movement of combina- 
tion. Capital laughs quietly at its Canute-like 
attempts to stay the tide, and labor has in part 



LIONS IN THE PATH 139 

been already liberated from its inclusion under 
the ban of trade-restraining organizations. But 
the attitude of the law towards competition affects 
labor more profoundly than capital. Capital has 
effective devices for evading anti-monopolistic 
laws. On the whole these have changed the mode 
and degree rather than the extent of capitalistic 
concentration. Even if the force of the competi- 
tive principle were applied equally all round, it 
would be far more serious to labor than to capital. 
For the weaker side — and labor is weaker by rea- 
son of numbers, it is weaker in prestige and in re- 
sources no less than in representation on law-mak- 
ing and law-adjudging bodies — is always the loser 
under "free" competition. "Free" competition is 
death to the ends of labor. Under it the weakest 
members of the stronger party set the pace for all. 
The grinding "marginal" employer becomes the 
most effective and determinant bargainer for his 
side, being capable of lowering the wage-rate over 
a whole industry. And on the other hand the 
weakest members of the weaker party are the 
least effective, but still determinant, bargainers 
for their side, compelling all of the same status 
to accept a lower rate. Here is the great irony 



140 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

of the much lauded competitive principle. Once 
it is understood the tremendous disadvantage be- 
comes plain which labor suffers under a system of 
law rooted in the philosophy of competition. 

The courts not only apply the law, they also in- 
terpret it. They must exercise discretionary 
power, they must determine motive in determin- 
ing breach of law, and thereby inevitably reveal 
their own natural bias, the bias of the code and 
of the philosophy that underlies the code. It is 
easy to see, and easy to illustrate, the disadvan- 
tage labor has suffered from the exercise of this 
discretion, in the interpretation of such phrases as, 
for example, "wanton and malicious," "designed 
mainly to injure the employer," "sufficient inter- 
est," "intimidation," "conspiracy," and so on. 
There is little doubt that if a system could be es- 
tablished whereby the decision of labor cases was 
entrusted to special industrial courts, withdrawn 
from the operation of the common law and the 
formulae and precedents of ordinary legal usage, 
it would remove much of the infirmity which labor 
feels in presence of the law. 

The present situation is well expressed in the 
words of one of the most fair-minded of economic 



LIONS IN THE PATH 141 

investigators, the later Professor Hoxie. "The 
law," he says, "in so far as it assumes to repre- 
sent the essence of positive justice but reflects the 
relations of handicraft industry, has no compre- 
hension of modern industrial conditions, nor of 
their inevitable consequences, and no modes of 
dealing with them except by prohibition. It has 
no comprehension of a machinery for dealing out 
justice in a state of society changed and chang- 
ing from that in which it was conceived. Being 
actually unable to outlaw combination, for indus- 
trial forces are more compelling than legal re- 
straint, not being wholly uncognizant of the in- 
justice worked by its arbitrary decrees, but unable 
to give up its pre-evolutionary standpoint, it is 
obliged to seek actual justice by shuffling, halting, 
roundabout methods and disingenuous distinctions 
which vary with the intelligence and bias of the 
particular courts. As the law in spirit is indi- 
vidualistic, as it makes the freedom and sacred- 
ness of individual contract the touchstone of abso- 
lute justice, and as the unions are formed to es- 
cape the evils of individualism and individual 
competition and contract, and all the union acts in 
positive support of these purposes do involve co- 



i 4 2 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

ercion, the law cannot help being in spirit inimical 
to unionism. Unionism is in its very essence a 
lawless thing, in its very purpose and spirit a chal- 
lenge to the law. Hence, even where the judges 
are understanding and intend to be sympathetic 
to unionism, if they are true to the law they must 
tend to be unfair to unionism. " 

These inequities are in some degree inherent 
in the slow process of legal evolution in every 
land, but in America they are of course aggravated 
by the peculiar authority of the judicature over 
the legislature. The power of the highest State 
courts and of the Supreme Court of the United 
States to declare measures "unconstitutional" is 
directly and indirectly a most formidable deterrent 
of political adaptation to the needs of a chang- 
ing order. This is now too obvious to require in- 
sistence upon it. New illustrations, such as the re- 
cent declaration of the "unconstitutionality" of the 
Federal Child Labor Law are constantly being 
offered to confirm the evidence of history. In the 
great upheaval which to-day is undermining the 
political traditions of the older lands it may well 
be that America, for all its ostentation of De- 
mocracy, will have fallen from the vanguard to 






LIONS IN THE PATH 143 

the rearguard of political advance. For a compli- 
cated mechanism may prove more inexpugnable 
than a living caste, and a venerated document be 
harder to dethrone than dynasts and emperors. 

There is indeed a process of adaptation that 
works even within the framework of antiquated 
forms, I do not wish to exaggerate the imper- 
meability of the law and the constitution. Not 
even they are immune from the transforming 
touch of time. Interpretations inspired by new 
needs undermine the letter of the ancient law. The 
wedge of collectivism, its thin edge the protection 
of "minors" against industrial harm, pierces the 
individualism of the code. The "police power" 
of the State is successfully invoked to save many 
needed measures from the constitutional guillo- 
tine. Acts are passed expressly safeguarding anti- 
competitive organizations, such as the trade- 
unions, from outlawry. The Supreme Court it- 
self is not so remote from changing public opin- 
ion that it does not register its influence. One 
significant indication is the confirmation by the 
Supreme Court of the constitutionality of the Ore- 
gon laws establishing a minimum wage and a ten- 
hour day respectively. The latter decision is par- 



144 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

tlcularly Interesting, since it is the first which has 
expressly vindicated interference with the "right 
of contract in a general and not a specific appli- 
cation, and since also it is in contradiction to for- 
mer decisions, such as that which declared "un- 
constitutional" the ten-hour bakery law of New 
York as "mere meddlesome interference with the 
rights of the individual." "It is impossible," says 
Mr. Lindley D. Clark in a review of these de- 
cisions in the Monthly Review of the Bureau of 
Labor Statistics, May, 19 17, "to read this account 
without recognizing that the law 'is to some extent 
a progressive science,' and that changes may be 
expected to continue in it as they have occurred 
in the past." Nevertheless these movements are 
like the awkward ever-impeded steps of a shack- 
led prisoner, not the forward motions of a man 
who freely pursues his course. It is hard enough 
to meet unbound the conditions imposed by the 
incessant technical change of modern capitalistic 
industry, but bound by the formulations of past 
centuries it becomes a Herculean task. 



LIONS IN THE PATH 145 

II 

In old mythologies they told of young gods, 
strangely born, foreordained to compass the over- 
throw of their parent deities. Gifted with simi- 
lar parricidal power, new forces have arisen out 
of the welter of American individualism, their 
destined task the dethronement of the venerated 
God of competition when the latter's work is done. 
That destiny is already in process of accomplish- 
ment. Every conquest within the competitive field 
has narrowed that field. Every device learned 
and practiced in the competitive struggle has been 
a means to abrogate or to transform that strug- 
gle. With wonderful success the victors have 
gathered power, property, and prestige to shield 
them from further assaults. The old warfare is, 
for the greater victors, past. What remains for 
them is consolidation, and the enjoyment of the 
ripening spoils. To this end, having destroyed 
competition within, they acclaim competition with- 
out, and in particular they decry all "socialism" 
(within which term they comprehend almost any 
degree of State regulation) as the ruin of a free 
Republic. 



h6 labor in the changing world 

The entrenched power of consolidated wealth 
is exercised directly over industry, and indirectly 
over government, over a multitude of voluntary 
associations, and over public opinion. With this 
power we are here concerned only in so far as it 
is used to stay the process of industrial adaptation 
to social needs. In one respect this power is itself 
the revelation of consummate adaptation, for it 
rests on combination and by its success shows how 
much more capable to survive and flourish is com- 
bination than its natural foes. But capitalistic 
combination, like some savage potentate, would 
secure by fratricide the throne it won by parricide. 
That is, it would destroy or nullify those other 
forms of combination which are also being shaped 
within the new industrial world, and which are the 
necessary safeguards against its own great power. 
In particular, it attacks the more effective forms 
of state supervision and regulation, and it deliber- 
ately attempts to suppress the growth of its own 
direct and proper counterpart, the organization of 
labor in unions. These activities imperil the 
needed reconstruction. Here indeed is the great- 
est peril that lies in the path, the opposition of the 
vast pervasive power of change-abhorring wealth. 



LIONS IN THE PATH 147 

This power is both direct and indirect, and a 
brief survey of both manifestations will indicate 
its magnitude. Directly, it is the autocrat of the 
whole world of business. In respect of wealth, 
great as is the concentration of ownership, it is 
little as compared with the concentration of con- 
trol. This has been brought about not only by the 
growth of industrial and commercial corporations 
and their alliance through trusts, voting trusts, 
combines, cartels, trade associations, interlocking 
directorates, rings and understandings of all 
kinds ; but still more through certain inner develop- 
ments of modern finance. One of these is the 
modern banking system, under which the banks, 
the trust companies, insurance companies, and 
other depositaries of the funds of the public, all 
closely interlinked, determine the direction in 
which new capital shall flow, the industrial soil 
which it shall fructify. Another is the central con- 
trol of values as recorded on the Stock Exchange. 
Wealth is ceasing to mean ownership of concrete 
means of production and becoming ownership of 
claims upon production, in the form of interest- 
bearing bonds and dividend-bearing shares of 
stock. These have transformed capital into some- 



i 4 8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

thing, for the ordinary man, uncannily abstract, 
into something homogeneous and divisible, readily 
transferable, wonderfully "sensitive" and "fluid," 
The celerity and direction of its flow depends on 
the ups and downs of the value barometer, and 
the financial "weather men," who sit in inner 
places, have prescience and partial control of these 
fluctuations. This inside knowledge, combined with 
such devices as majority holdings of common stock 
and interlocking directorates, gives a small circle 
of financial power a certain control over the com- 
bined wealth of half the people. 

This is the inmost circle of a wider oligarchy, 
which, by its increasing control over prices, would 
control, among other things, the wages of labor. 
It is easy to see how this power over prices gives 
capital a great advantage in the struggle with la- 
bor. It may be able so to manipulate profits 
that demands for better wages or conditions ap- 
pear to spell disaster. Or, failing that, it can rep- 
resent wage-increases as additional taxes upon the 
consumer, and indeed ensure that they shall be 
such, so starting a vicious (and profitable) cycle 
of higher prices, which in time makes the seeming 
gains of labor specious and vain. 



LIONS IN THE PATH 149 

We must at the same time remember that the 
economic oligarchy is itself the result of the eco- 
nomic system which it in part controls. The sys- 
tem is in fact more powerful than the oligarchy — 
a truth which is generally applicable to political 
oligarchy as well. Just as the wage-system dom- 
inates the life of the worker, so does the price- 
system dominate the activity of the employer. The 
employer is impelled to secure himself as far as 
possible against the dangers of the speculative 
method of production, against the constant risk of 
rising costs or falling prices, against the loss of 
his market through competition or changes in de- 
mand, against the vagaries of the business cycle; 
and in the process, unless he occupies a peculiarly 
sheltered position, he is bound to exercise over 
labor whatever control he can. Capital possesses 
certain advantages over labor which by its very 
nature it is bound to exploit — and will continue to 
exploit save as liberation comes through the devel- 
opment of new forces strong enough to change the 
system by which both capital and labor are for the 
present bound. 

Labor is hired by capital and not capital 
by labor. There is nearly always a surplus of 



150 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

labor asking capital to give it employment. Labor 
is "fired" by capital and never capital by labor. 
The determination of processes as well as of 
prices, of tasks as well as (though no longer 
wholly) of payments, of responsibilities as well 
as of rewards, belongs to capital. This economic 
power, above all the power of dismissal, is a means 
to influence the policy of labor. Just as the small 
patriarchal employer of old times often applied 
his economic power to ensure that his employe 
attend church or voted according to direction, so 
the great modern corporation attempts to check 
what it regards as undesirable tendencies of 
thought among its workers. It is inevitable that 
power should establish its advantage in these ways, 
by whatever class or party or interest the power 
is possessed. But in the times of reconstruction 
it is a lion in the path. 

In respect of the less direct forms of control, 
the power of wealth ramifies so far into every 
nook and cranny of the social structure that a re- 
view of this kind can but suggest the broader 
channels of its exercise. The control of politics 
is of course the first external aim of economic 
power. In the preceding section of this chapter 



LIONS IN THE PATH 151 

I have indicated how great is the advantage which 
the law and constitution give to the upholders of 
the status quo. This is reinforced by the party 
system, with its secret machinery, its antiquated 
cumbrousness, its chicanery, and its dependence for 
funds on generosity, however motived. It is by 
control of the mechanism of the party-system, 
from the small wheels managed by ward-bosses up 
to the great wheels which move silently in Wash- 
ington, that the wealth of America has succeeded, 
in such large measure, in translating a democrat- 
ically-minded nation into an effective plutocracy. 
In the United States, as also in Canada, wealth 
has laid its hand with power on the helm of the 
ship of State, not indeed with undisputed author- 
ity, but sufficiently to deflect it far from its ap- 
pointed democratic course. The plutocracy does 
not enter politics merely to defend its gains ; to win 
over, by fair means or foul, the opponents of its 
interests, not excluding leaders of labor, to ac- 
quire cheap franchises, exemptions and other 
privileges ; it offers also, through its political serv- 
ants, a national policy. It is a policy to divert at- 
tention from national welfare to national bigness, 
from the needs of a people to its ambitions, from 



152 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

intrinsic fulfillment to the vainglory of the race- 
spirit. It is a policy of expansion, of combative 
protection, a policy that makes appeal to the 
coarser elemental passions which steal the name of 
patriotism. 

To control the mechanism of politics it is neces- 
sary also in some degree to dominate public opin- 
ion: and the various institutions and associations 
which mold that opinion are thus subject to strong 
persuasions. An institution which depends on the 
endowments or contributions of the wealthy, be it 
philanthropic association, church, or university, 
is in some peril of losing its free spirit. I have 
heard the director of a great philanthropic associ- 
ation confess that its policy must not offend the 
prejudices of wealthy donors. Even the univer- 
sities have not lacked ominous signs of suppres- 
sion or intolerance. Teachers have been dis- 
charged or passed over, not for incompetence but 
for opinions contrary to the sentiments of a gov- 
erning board. The issue is clearly defined in the 
Report on Academic Freedom and Academic Ten- 
ure prepared by a committee of the American As- 
sociation of University Professors. It contains 
the significant statement: "In the early period of 



LIONS IN THE PATH 153 

University development in America the chief men- 
ace to academic freedom was ecclesiastical, and 
the disciplines chiefly affected were philosophy 
and the natural sciences. In more recent times 
the danger zone has been shifted to the political 
and social sciences." Happily the spirit of in- 
tolerance does not prevail, for if it did, all the 
dignity, all the inner worth and meaning of the 
University would be lost, all the sustaining happi- 
ness of the hard search for truth, which yet, to 
those who know it, is more than compensation for 
the greater material rewards of other professions, 
would be destroyed. 

But it is the more immediate agencies and stimu- 
lants of opinion which organized wealth is most 
anxious to control, the stage, the screen, the press 
— above all, the press. The significance of the 
newspaper and periodical in making as distinct 
from reflecting public opinion is well understood 
by all the rulers of man. The effect of its ubiq- 
uitous suggestion, poured with such facility 
morning and afternoon, spread abroad with such 
rapidity, finding its way into nearly every home, 
is incalculable. Its double armor of irresponsi- 
bility and anonymity renders it almost invulner- 



154 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

able, and conveys the idea of some impersonal 
force — as if it were the mouthpiece not of indi- 
vidual men but of society itself. Even if the press 
were inexorably truthful, it would still, if con- 
trolled, be dangerous: for the power of selection 
which it exercises is a more subtle determinant of 
opinion. Any course whatever can be made to ap- 
pear noble or base without one iota of direct falsi- 
fication, according as the bias of the press selects 
and omits and gives prominence to one or other set 
of facts and opinions. By this means the press can 
exercise an almost hypnotic influence on the minds 
of men. Hence there is a vital danger to democ- 
racy as the tendency to combination, under capital- 
istic control, spreads to the newspaper world. This 
applies to news agencies as well as to journals. 
The former have a more pervasive and imper- 
sonal influence, reaching out from the cheap "boi- 
ler-plate" provided for country newspapers to the 
special reports of current events. There have 
been in the States certain cases which seem to sug- 
gest that "the interests" have a very direct influ- 
ence on the news agencies. It is claimed, for exam- 
ple, by labor that the press agency reports of 
strikes and other labor disturbances, such as those 



LIONS IN THE PATH 155 

of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Workers and the 
West Virginia miners, are one-sided and mislead- 
ing. A contrast is drawn between the publicity giv- 
en to the McNamara case and the concerted silence 
of the press on the Mooney case, where the vindi- 
cation of labor instead of that of capital was in- 
volved. If this is true, it becomes a public danger 
of the gravest kind. It is easy to see that the con- 
trol of opinion becomes a more vital concern the 
more a country develops toward democracy. In- 
terests which formerly could command have now 
to persuade, to justify themselves, and they be- 
come on that account eager to control the organ of 
opinion. 

Fortunately, this last lion in the path is, like the 
lion of the child's story-book, unable to withstand 
the "power of the human eye." To face it, to 
perceive it, is to overcome it. Eternal vigilance 
is here also the price of democracy — and there are 
always organs of opinion strong enough and fear- 
less enough to withstand those influences and to 
stimulate that necessary vigilance. To-day, when 
the world is sick with longing for a new and bet- 
ter order, it is more necessary than ever before. 



CHAPTER IX 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD : A CONTRAST IN 
LABOR CONDITIONS 

The extent of labor organization in the United 
Kingdom and in America respectively. Why 
labor in America has been politically frus- 
trate. Emigration versus Immigration. Other 
contrasts. Differences in spirit between the 
old world and the new, and their effects on the 
situation of labor. 

Up to the present there has not been, in the 
United States or Canada, any activity, directed 
towards the improvement of industrial relations, 
at all comparable, in breadth and seriousness, with 
that now manifested in Great Britain. One rea- 
son is not far to seek. The spiritual disquietude 
of the war was slow to reach these shores. There 
has not been that shock to the sense of an estab- 
lished order, that disturbance of all complacencies, 
which swept the countries suddenly and completely 
drawn into the maelstrom. But there are other 

reasons besides this, reasons inherent in the great 

156 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 157 

differences between new-world and old-world con- 
ditions. It is indeed sometimes thought that these 
differences render unnecessary the more heroic 
measures advocated or planned in older countries, 
that we can get along without any great modifica- 
tion of the existing haphazard relations of capi- 
tal and labor. I do not read in this way the signs 
of the times. I think it is very possible, on the 
contrary, that unless adequate thought be given to 
it and preparation made, the after-war industrial 
situation in North America may grow at least as 
acute as in Europe. The differences are real and 
great, but some of them aggravate rather than 
diminish the need for preparedness. They may 
prevent the application by us of old-world solu- 
tions, but they make more imperative the quest and 
discovery of our own. 

It is worth while, therefore, to review briefly 
the chief differences in question. They are differ- 
ences of organization and differences of spirit. 

Of the former kind the most obvious is the 
greater development of labor organization in 
Great Britain. Taking the figures for the last 
year before the war as affording the fairest basis 
for comparison, we find that the United Kingdom 



158 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

had, in proportion to population, more than three 
times as many trade unionists as America. Al- 
lowance must of course be made for the greater 
industrialization of Britain, but it is clear that the 
organization of labor is particularly inadequate 
in America. This failure stands in the way of all 
constructiveness. It would be difficult to work 
out, say, the Whitley plan in America, for that 
plan depends on the representation of the work- 
ers on industrial councils, and without organiza- 
tion there can scarcely be true representation. 
Another consequence is that in America there is 
not the same complex system of established trade- 
union rules which governed labor in British fac- 
tories and workshops. These rules are double- 
edged. Being motived by a distrust of capitalis- 
tic management, a distrust born of past experi- 
ence and too often confirmed by existing condi- 
tions, they proved a serious obstacle to industrial 
efficiency, but at the same time they gave to the 
worker a certain protection here unattained. 

The growth of the American Federation of 
Labor during the last twenty years, under the in- 
fluence of economic conditions which have gradu- 
ally established here, as in Europe, a distinctive 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 159 

working class or series of classes, may point to- 
wards a coming organization of labor in America 
comparable with that already attained in Great 
Britain. 

One of the most significant differences between 
American and English labor is found in their re- 
spective attitudes towards political action. In 
Great Britain, and generally in Western Europe, 
the modern development of trade unionism has 
gone hand in hand with the growth of a political 
labor party, which, whatever its weaknesses and 
divisions, has at any rate been strong enough to 
influence the policies of the traditional parties. 
Already in Great Britain it confidently aspires to 
victory over the opposing political forces. Where- 
as in America labor has been politically frustrate, 
neither strong enough to create an enduring party 
of its own, nor united enough to formulate a com- 
mon platform, nor influential enough to affect very 
seriously the policies and conflicts of the older 
parties. In America no fierce protracted strug- 
gle for the elementary right to vote rallied to the 
cause of radicalism a whole disfranchised class; 
no sacrosanct association of landownership and 
political supremacy seemed to bind men fast to pre- 



160 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

established servitude. Again, the conflicting va- 
riety of labor legislation enacted by forty-eight 
autonomous states, the diversity of race-composi- 
tion and also of economic and social development 
over a continental area, the individualistic tradition 
of a people awakened to the wealth of a still ex- 
ploitable land, these have confused the political is- 
sue between labor and capital; while the conserva- 
tive mechanism of the American Constitution, so 
generally lauded nevertheless as the very palla- 
dium of liberty, has constituted a barrier between 
labor and the fruits of whatever political victory 
it might hope to achieve. For these reasons the 
protests and struggles of labor have been more 
narrowly economic, and only a socialist minority 
has insisted on the correlation of political and 
economic power. It is easy to explain the aloof- 
ness from independent politics of the more con- 
servative body of labor in America — whether that 
aloofness is to-day justified is much more dubious. 
Labor in other lands has had no less formidable, 
though different, obstacles to overcome in order to 
achieve any real political weight, and the associa- 
tion of economic and political power is ungainsay- 
able. American labor has not developed the 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 161 

wider statesmanship, the constructive policy, that 
political experience is beginning to bestow on la- 
bor elsewhere. There is little sign that it can 
seize, with decisive insight into the need not of a 
class but of a people, an occasion so vast as that 
now unrolling before the industrial world. There 
is little sign that it can, for example, either pro- 
duce or adopt a program of the strength and 
quality of that enunciated in the manifestoes of the 
British Labor Party. 1 

Another vital difference springs from the cir- 
cumstance that Britain is subject to emigra- 
tion and America to immigration. Emigration 
simplifies and immigration complicates the labor 
problem. It is quite obvious that in any country 
subject to large-scale immigration no stable or- 
ganization of industry can be maintained apart 
from a supporting policy in this regard. To this 
difficult subject I shall later return. Here I need 

1 Since the above was written there has begun, once again, 
the formation of a political Labor Party, through the activity 
of a number of State Labor Federations, commencing with 
Illinois and New York. This means a new conflict between 
the wider and the narrower idea of labor, between those who 
discern the relation of economic and political power and the 
hard-shelled doctrinaires of the Gompers regime. It is sig- 
nificant that the new parties claim to consider "the good of 
all who work by hand or brain." 



i6a LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

merely refer to the way in which immigration 
creates cross-divisions within the sphere of labor. 
In every country the distinction between skilled 
and unskilled labor is an obstacle to solidarity, 
but especially so in America, where unskilled labor 
is largely immigrant, recruited from alien peoples 
with different traditions and lower standards of 
living. This creates a more determinate division 
of economic class and economic interest than is 
found in Europe, and it makes the common or- 
ganization of labor harder to realize. In Britain 
the general labor unions form an important, if not 
yet integrated, part of the whole trade union move- 
ment, while in America unskilled labor remains 
a chaotic unorganized mass, save for the fragments 
that are from time to time caught up by revolu- 
tionary doctrines. It was this issue, the solidarity 
of all labor versus the distinction of interest be- 
tween skilled and unskilled, which was, for the 
time being at least, decided in the historic con- 
flict of the Knights of Labor and the American 
Federation; and the triumph of the latter, in the 
late eighties of last century, signally revealed the 
reality and the extent of the cleavage. 

Again, we suffer more violent transitions from 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 163 

prosperity to adversity, from boom to depression, 
than do the older countries. These transitions 
profoundly disturb the development of labor poli- 
cies. In the boom periods, such as the sixties and 
the early eighties, labor organizations have gener- 
ally grown strong and aggressive, only to fall back 
disorganizedly, in the ensuing depression, into 
rarely tenable positions of defense. Further- 
more, in the older industrial countries the relation 
between agriculture and industry, though dis- 
turbed by the exceptional stress of the 'war, ap- 
proaches nearer a state of equilibrium than with 
us. For these reasons we experience greater fluc- 
tuations of employment and unemployment than a 
country like Great Britain, while we have fewer 
safeguards in the form of provision and insurance 
against this and other industrial risks. Such con- 
ditions undoubtedly make industrial reconstruc- 
tion harder to achieve, but they certainly do not 
lessen the likelihood of after-war crisis. 

Along with these differences of organization 
there are corresponding differences of spirit to be 
reckoned. Differences in organization are easily 
seen and described, but differences of spirit are 
more elusive and hard to isolate in the confusing 



164 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

cross-currents of what we take to be the national 
life. To suggest them in a phrase or two is to run 
grave risk of simplifying, exaggerating, and dis- 
torting them. Yet there seems to be a quality in 
American civilization which has an immediate 
bearing on the industrial situation. For one of 
its main effects is to give a primacy, a simplicity, 
and in fact a narrowness to the economic interest 
less universal elsewhere. Elsewhere men are apt 
to seek economic power as a means to position, 
dignity, political and social dominance. Here 
these superiorities are more often regarded, by the 
men who acquire them at least, if not by their pri- 
vileged families, as a means to economic power; 
and wealth buys its gratifications more directly, 
more ostentatiously, and also, to use the term with 
no necessary implication of better or worse, more 
materialistically. Similarly, where the struggle is 
not for wealth but livelihood, the economic arena 
more completely bounds men's aspirations. The 
small circles which call out men's loyalties less 
clearly connect with the great circle of the nation. 
Cohesiveness, especially among immigrant groups, 
may be even more intense than elsewhere, but it is 
fragmentary. There is more opportunism, more 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 165 

economic ruthlessness, though the idealism which 
does emerge is also less fettered by tradition. 
Whence arise many of the peculiarities of our 
social and political structure, many of its defects 
— and many of its potentialities. 

The conditions of our growth as a continent 
have left their impress, even where they no longer 
manifestly operate. These conditions bred or at- 
tracted the more individualistic and externally ad- 
venturous types, the pioneer, the migrant, the 
land-exploiter, the hunter after fortune. Theirs 
was indeed the necessary spirit of an army of oc- 
cupation, but the time of settlement follows, and 
then that spirit proves a hindrance. More sta- 
bility is demanded, a wider purpose, a deeper 
sense of social responsibility. 

This has been lacking in our industrial relations, 
perhaps more obviously than in other lands. I 
am speaking in general, well aware of numerous 
exceptions, but the general statement seems true. 
It applies as much to workers as employers, but, 
by reason of his economic advantage, it is the em- 
ployer who must first exhibit that change of atti- 
tude without which harmonious relations will be 
still less realized in the future than in the past. 



.166 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

On this point there is much need of insistence. If, 
in the changed temper of labor and of the world, 
industrial order, not to say human progress, is to 
be assured after the war, the employer must every- 
where unlearn the doctrine that human labor is 
merely a commodity, so to be treated, so to be 
bought, so to be used up, driven, or rejected, as 
will conduce to the immediate maximum of pro- 
ductivity or of profit. The very opportunities 
afforded by a young land have contributed to foster 
that attitude, men being so engrossed in its ex- 
ploitation, in the control of its material resources, 
that they have scarcely been able to stop and con- 
sider its human costs. I remember talking to the 
manager of a large packing plant, who told me en- 
thusiastically how the introduction of a resident 
doctor, along with some simple hygienic precau- 
tions, had worked wonders in the health of his es- 
tablishment. "Formerly," he said, "we had forty 
cases of septic poisoning a month, now we have 
scarcely three." I enquired why, if the provision 
was so simple, inexpensive and effective, it had 
never been introduced before. "We have been so 
busy expanding," he replied, "that we had no time 
to think about it before." A young country fur- 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 167 

nishes a particular temptation to think more in 
terms of size than of welfare, of output than of 
human utility. To grow big has naturally, perhaps 
inevitably, seemed more urgent than to lay the 
sound foundations of prosperity. But whatever 
justifications may have been offered for that doc- 
trine in the past they are ruled out by the neces- 
sities of the present. 

A good illustration of the kind of irresponsibil- 
ity to which I refer is found in the attitude of the 
majority of workers and the majority of employ- 
ers towards unionism. But this is a subject of 
such importance as to deserve a separate chapter. 



CHAPTER X 

RECONSTRUCTION AND THE TRADE UNION 

Indifference towards unionism of the majority 
of wage-earners. Opposition on the part of 
employers. Attitude of the general public. 
The union as a sine qua non of industrial order 
and progress. Objections to unionism consid- 
ered. Probable developments. Equilibrium 
versus harmony in industrial relations, and the 
principles underlying both. Reflections on 
unorganized labor. 

There is nothing that to my mind more clearly 
reveals our general failure to appreciate the con- 
ditions of industrial progress than the prevailing 
attitude towards trade-unionism. I have already 
commented on the lack of interest on the side of 
the workers. The only organization that stands 
definitely for the wage-earner is the union, and yet 
in America probably less than fifteen per cent of 
the wage-earners are organized. For whatever 
causes, indifference, timidity, lack of stability, dif- 
ficulty of rural organization, and so on, the large 

1 68 



RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 169 

majority of workers still remain outside the unions. 
Even of those inside a large number have but the 
feeblest hold on the union principle, as the great 
fluctuations in membership from time to time re- 
veal; while a still larger number are indifferent 
to any but the immediate interests of their own 
which unionism may serve. Except in a few 
specially favorable industries the union itself re- 
mains at a rudimentary stage of development. 
The great problems of unionism, such as the rela- 
tive merits of craft, trade, and industry as units 
of organization; the relation of unionism to politi- 
cal activity; the adjustment of the interests of 
skilled and unskilled workers ; the coordination of 
conflicting jurisdictions — have received far less 
attention than they deserve. And union policy as 
a whole is hand-to-mouth, haphazard, and frag- 
mentary. 

On the other side a great number of employers 
exhibit, not mere indifference, but open or secret 
hostility to unionism. Too often they regard the 
union as a mere nuisance, a source of disturbance 
and "agitation" which they refuse to recognize ex- 
cept under force majeure. Every conceivable de- 
vice — black lists, white lists, employment books, 



170 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

card catalogues, "iron-clad" oaths, espionage, dis- 
criminatory bonus and "welfare" schemes, subor- 
nation, bribery, and all the rest — has been used to 
frustrate and discourage the union. Employers 
great and small, from the directorate of the U. S. 
Steel Corporation to the boss of the most wretched 
New York sweating den, have discriminated 
against unionists. In a country that calls itself 
free beyond others the elementary right of or- 
ganization has been denied more truculently than 
perhaps anywhere else in the world. The union, 
its opponents believe, make the worker less sub- 
missive. Naturally they do not consider whether 
there are not in industry conditions to which the 
workers should not submit. It is not the union, 
it is the condition under which so many workers 
toil and exist, from which "unrest" springs. The 
union voices that unrest, it does not create it. 
Rather, the union gives it an orderly expression, 
and helps to suppress its more violent and inef- 
fective forms. The union cannot even be said 
in general to foster strikes, as is evident from the 
fact that the oldest established unions are gen- 
erally the slowest to appeal to the strike, and that 



RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 171 

a large percentage of strikes take place contrary 
to the ruling of the union executives. 

Lastly, the "outside public," that large body 
which rightly or wrongly regards itself as belong- 
ing to the ranks neither of capitalists nor of wage- 
earners, has tended to look with little favor on the 
union, often condemning it as a mischief-making 
association interfering with the ordinary business 
of the community. I have heard professional 
men denounce the union principle, never reflecting 
that their own professional organizations, those of 
law and medicine, for example, are just particu- 
larly successful and privileged unions, pursuing in 
their own sphere the same ends, and employing 
many of the same methods, as industrial unions. 
Those who really desire to see order take the place 
of chaos in industrial relations should, instead of 
discouraging, do what they can to encourage union- 
ism. 

The truth is that the "outside public," the rank 
and file of the traditional political parties, the 
small landlords, the farmers, the professional 
men, the small business men, retailers, clerks, have 
been rather blindly individualistic. Their not un- 
warranted fear of the aggression of big associa- 



172 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

tions has led them to the quite unwarranted infer- 
ence that the national interest is best secured where 
industrial and commercial associations remain 
small. They were always trying to push compe- 
tition a little further from themselves and piously 
hoping that it would nevertheless continue, for 
their benefit, its unabated sway over others, par- 
ticularly over the bigger amalgamations which in 
fact are most able to control it. They did not 
see that free competition is free disorganization, 
that the predatory chaos of small business is ut- 
terly wasteful and subjects employers and workers 
alike to endless demoralizing hazards, whereas the 
unification of large business, given intelligent 
political control, prepares the way for an era of 
security and constructiveness. There will be no 
industrial order worth having until industry is or- 
ganized as a whole, which means also until labor 
is organized as a whole. Now the pendulum is 
swinging back from the extreme of individualism, 
and as it moves, the attitude of the public towards 
unionism grows more sympathetic. 

For we must come to see that in the modern in- 
dustrial world the union is a necessary means to 
the securing of order and progress. This is being 



RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 173 

realized in the older lands, where every plan for 
the improvement of industrial relations, such as 
the Whitley program, depends on the active par- 
ticipation of the unions. Just as employers' asso- 
ciations stand for the point of view of capital, so 
trade unions must stand for the point of view of 
labor. The union should stand for all those who 
work, as they say in mining, "at the face," who 
know its toil and expense of spirit, who alone can 
appreciate its human costs, who are partners in all 
production, and may claim as partners to have a 
voice in the determination of its conditions and in 
the apportionment of its products. To refuse 
recognition to the union, or more generally, to re- 
gard a business as existing merely for the sake 
of its "owner" in the sense of those who contribute 
its capital, is to treat partners in production as in- 
struments only of production, it is to treat persons 
as only mechanisms. 

It is often objected that the unions impede in- 
dustrial progress by prescribing limitation of out- 
put, by opposing the introduction of labor-saving 
devices, by insisting on uniformity of wage-rates, 
and so on. There is truth in the indictment, 
though it is a common and serious mistake to sup- 



174 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

pose that all the opposition to improved means of 
production comes from the workers: capital also 
is conservative and has vested interests which 
sometimes block technical advance. Besides, the 
truth of the indictment is subordinate to the deeper 
truth that this opposition is a part of the penalty 
we pay under a system which sharply divorces the 
interest of labor from that of capital. Again 
it is not unionism but the system which must finally 
be held responsible. The remedy can be found 
only in an industrial order wherein men can work 
safe from the haunting tragic fear — none the less 
potent because it is sometimes illusory — that their 
very efficiency may be their undoing, that their 
speed will bring unemployment or their skill be the 
means of lowering their own or their fellow work- 
ers' wages. 

How can that be achieved apart from the trade 
union? Without security in their work how can 
the wage-earners have effective interest in their 
work, and how can they have security without or- 
ganization? Without the union how can the more 
cut-throat forms of competition, so fatal to the 
workers' standard of life, ever be abolished? 
How can that standing menace of civilization, un- 



RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 175 

employment, ever be mastered? Without the 
union how can understandings be reached which 
will permit of the full application of beneficent 
science within industry? Without the union how 
can the sense of impotence be overcome which 
leads to violence, disintegration, and revolution- 
aryism? Without the union how can the most ele- 
mentary safe-guards of free men, in face of the 
vast power of organized capital described in the 
preceding chapter, be attained? It is the union 
which has made possible the remarkable spells of 
fruitful peace which have been witnessed in, for 
example, the cotton industry of Lancashire and 
the bituminous coal industry of America. It is 
the trade union bargaining freely and strongly 
with the employers' organization which has opened 
up the new way of trade agreements, giving the 
administration of a constitution to such industries 
as transportation, mining in many of its branches, 
the building trades, the pottery trade, the printing 
trades, and the metal trades. It is the union, 
through its national organization, which has made 
possible during the crisis of war, the establishment 
of machinery to prevent industrial disputes, the 
redistribution of labor according to war needs, 



176 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

and the acceleration and increase of output. And 
finally, beyond these beginnings and temporary 
expedients, it is only by aid of the union that the 
new order of industry can be achieved. 

What precise form this evolution will take can 
scarcely be foreseen. Any real harmony seems 
still far off, must indeed be far off while the in- 
terests of labor and capital remain so disparate. 
Labor will have to cease to be mere servant and 
capital mere owner before such harmony is realiz- 
able. The cleavage of function which the indus- 
trial age introduced must be redintegrated into 
some form of community of function, so that the 
terms "capital" and "labor" lose their present 
day distinctiveness as applied to groups of men. 
If that cooperative ideal is a vain dream, so also 
is harmony. But in any case it lies in the remoter 
future, towards which nevertheless it is necessary 
to work. In the meantime, not harmony but only 
equilibrium is possible, through the realization, 
by these opposing and not unequally matched 
forces, of their indispensibility to one another. 
This realization will naturally create not so much 
a common organization of employers and em- 
ployed as a common meeting ground of their re- 



RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 177 

spective organizations. The direction of immedi- 
ate progress is, in America at least, not common 
or joint councils in the strict sense, but a system 
giving the representatives of organized labor 
regular access to the representatives of organized 
capital. With the existing cleavage of interest 
a common council would tend to be common merely 
in name, the meeting together of two utterly dis- 
tinct groups. The immediate establishment of 
common industrial councils might also endanger, 
in all except the best organized industries, the de- 
velopment of unionism, which is the intermediate 
step towards the new order. 

But equilibrium is a thousand times better than 
chaos. That it is practicable (though never se- 
cure) many modern instances, such as that of the 
bituminous coal industry above referred to, reveal. 
But it is practicable only if certain principles, still 
far from general acceptance, are conceded by both 
sides. These principles involve the agreement: 

( 1 ) On the part of the employers, not to dismiss 
or prejudice employes for union member- 
ship or activity; to confer, on all matters di- 
rectly affecting them, with the representatives 



178 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

of organized labor or generally of the em- 
ployes concerned; to permit the reference of 
grievances, appeals against "unfair" dis- 
missal, &c, to the joint meeting of represen- 
tatives or a special grievance committee 
similarly constituted. 
(2) On the part of the workers, to discounte- 
anace deliberate limitation of output and 
other hindrances to productivity, no longer 
necessary to protect their working conditions, 
and to insist on the fulfillment by all workers 
of contracts and trade agreements entered 
into with the employers. 

What results can be attained by mutual accept- 
ance of these principles the war-time experience 
of many belligerent states has revealed. The war 
made intensive and uninterrupted production im- 
perative. Means had to be devised which would 
ensure that the incessant conflict of labor and capi- 
tal should not for the time being issue in strikes 
and lockouts, particularly in plants working on 
government orders. The most effective means 
was found to be a direct contract between the gov- 
ernment as ultimate employer and the labor or- 



RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 179 

ganizations, giving the latter both recognition and 
the status of a partner, through representation in 
the determination of policy. This was the plan 
followed by the Navy Department, the Emerg- 
ency Fleet Corporation and its Shipbuilding Labor 
Adjustment Board, the fuel administration, the 
railroad administration and one division of the 
War Department. It was finally embodied in the* 
constitution of the National War Labor Board, 
All this was an entirely new policy, so far as the 
Government of the United States is concerned. 
But it made possible the notable achievement of 
nearly uninterrupted industrial activity on an enor- 
mous scale, in the cantonment construction camps, 
in the docks, shipyards, navy yards, and arsenals, 
in the coal mines and on the railroads. That this 
new policy, and not alone the favorable concomi- 
tants of patriotic enthusiasm and relatively high 
wages, was responsible for productive efficiency is 
suggested by the contrasting conditions in branches 
of industry, such as the lumber camps and copper 
mines, where no such methods prevailed. It is 
of course neither possible nor desirable to apply 
under peace conditions the compulsions exercised 
during the war, but the lesson of the dependence of 



180 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

efficiency on the active cooperation of both sides 
should not be lost. 

It may be in place to suggest here certain fur- 
ther principles, which must be accepted before 
common councils, in the strict sense of the term 
"common," could be established with success. 
They are as briefly as possible these two : 

;(l) That each workshop, occupation or industry 
is a cooperative unity, in which all the mem- 
bers, management and workers too, have a 
vital interest, and where a vital interest, 
should have also a voice in decisions that 
affect it — not subordinated to the claims of 
any outside and merely passive ownership; 

(2) That each workshop, occupation or indus- 
try is but a specialized division of the com- 
munity, cooperating with all others in sup- 
plying a nation's needs; that it is therefore 
fulfilling a national service — and a service 
that indeed goes often beyond the nation — 
united with all other services in national 
obligation under the sanction of the State. 

The distance we are from the acceptance of 
such principles is the distance between us and real 



RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 181 

industrial harmony. Its greatness is the justifica- 
tion for the opinion that meantime we must 
look on equilibrium as the direct aim to be 
achieved, not a static equilibrium, which is im- 
possible in human affairs, but a "moving equi- 
librium" leading by orderly process to a goal con- 
jectured but unknown. 

I have insisted on the necessity of organiza- 
tion as the first condition of order and progress. 
How needful it is a contrasting glance at the con- 
dition of unorganized labor reveals. It is, taken 
as a whole, the most depressed part of labor, the 
most exploited, the most inefficient, the most un- 
skilled, the most prone to the extremes of brutal 
indifference and spasmodic violence. It is the 
least socialized, the least able to achieve its own 
salvation. For the more unorganized types of 
labor the direct intervention of the State, by way 
of Trade Boards charged with the task of assur- 
ing minimum rates and decent conditions of work, 
is the only immediate hope. And this is a make- 
shift, an acknowledgment of the helplessness of 
that class to secure its own deliverance, merely 
a means of making its work tolerable and no 



1 82 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

longer a peril to the standards of the rest of the 
community. 

In a word, it is not organized labor that is the 
peril — the real peril to the nation is unorganized 
labor, and the spirit that would keep labor un- 
organized. The organization of labor is a basis 
necessary for any permanent reconstruction in in- 
dustry, for any creation of order out of our grow- 
ing chaos. 



CHAPTER XI 

LABOR, IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 

Why a surplus of labor? Is unemployment in- 
evitable? Organized redirection of the de- 
mand for labor the way to remove unemploy- 
ment. The answer to the Malthusian chal- 
lenge. The need for immigrational control. 
The literary tests. A suggestion for a more 
flexible mode of control. 

"At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant 
cover" for every new comer in a world already 
possessed. This was the substance of a famous 
parable written by Malthus at the end of the 1 8th 
century. Most significant changes have taken 
place since then. Forces which he saw but did 
not appreciate have assumed a new importance. 
The principle of population which he formulated 
and feared has been profoundly modified by the 
psychological reactions of an age that no longer 
fears the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Some 
thinkers have in fact already passed to the con- 
trary pessimism, forecasting a world of dwindling 

183 



184 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

population and "race-suicide." Whether that 
pessimism is not equally vain is a question I have 
elsewhere discussed. 1 What I wish to insist on is 
that, in spite of all this change, one corner-stone 
of the argument of Malthus remains as solid as 
ever. It is the permanent "surplus" of labor, the 
over-supply of workers relative to the demand for 
their services. This constitutes the crucial ques- 
tion of the modern industrial order. 

Why should there be chronic unemployment? 
Why should the supply of labor in every indus- 
trial country normally exceed the demand? Why 
is there not "enough work to go round"? Why 
should the fear of over-production characterize a 
civilization beset by poverty? It is not that, abso- 
lutely, too much of any good is produced to satisfy 
the desire for it. The wants of the whole popula- 
tion for any good have never been satisfied. It is 
not that, absolutely, the population is already too 
great for the land and its resources. There is more 
unemployment, as a rule, in the United States and 
Canada, with their unfilled fertile lands, than in 
the United Kingdom. It is not that, absolutely, 
the capital is lacking which can set labor profit- 

1 In my book Community, Bk. Ill, c. VI, §i, and c. VII, §5. 



IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 185 

ably to work. In the words of Mr. Beveridge, 
"unemployment is a question not of the scale of 
industry but of its organization." While capital, 
relatively to population, has greatly increased in 
industrial lands, unemployment has not propor- 
tionately decreased. On this point the great war 
has also a plain lesson to teach us. Its insatiate 
demand for capital has tapped no less adequate 
sources of supply, because there existed the will 
and the organization to provide it. The capital 
necessary so to organize industry as to set all the 
genuine unemployed to work — to work fruitful 
in the production of further wealth, not, like war- 
fare, destructive of the wealth that already exists 
— is but a trifle in comparison. If the will and 
the organization were forthcoming, the problem 
of unemployment would be solved forever. 

What is the nature of this requisite organiza- 
tion? The root of unemployment — and of a hun- 
dred economic maladjustments — -is the unregu- 
lated relation of demand to supply. In respect 
of labor, demand controls, not supply, but the 
utilization and direction of the supply. "De- 
mand," as a great English writer in another field 
of thought has said, "is very imperious, and supply 



1 86 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

must be very suppliant.'' Demand is a function 
of the existing distribution of wealth, and directs 
the supply so as to maintain that distribution or 
even to enhance its inequality. The poorer you 
are, the less your demand (however great your 
need) ; the less therefore the provision for satis- 
fying your demand. The richer you are, the 
greater your demand (however socially insig- 
nificant your yet unsatisfied need) and therefore 
the greater the diversion of labor to satisfy your 
demand. From which it follows that superfluity 
and poverty (and therefore unemployment) have 
a common root. Every increase of capital — and 
in normal times there is an almost automatic in- 
crease of capital from year to year — makes greater 
prosperity possible, but the general industrial dis- 
organization, of which the competitive inferiority 
of the labor supply has hitherto been an essential 
quality, so defeats its beneficent working that the 
great mass of poverty seems little if at all dimin- 
ished. 

If the preceding analysis, which is the merest 
summary of the conclusions of the most compe- 
tent investigations into the whole problem, is 
true, it follows that a certain organized redirec- 



IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 187 

tion of the demand for labor is the radical cure 
for genuine unemployment. Valuable aids are 
found in the systematization of labor, through pub- 
lic employment exchanges, through industrial and 
general training and guidance, through whatever 
regularization of seasonal trades is feasible, 
through the methods which reduce labor turn- 
over, through the decasualization of casual labor, 
and through the control of hours and conditions 
of works. But these, important and necessary as 
they are, rather prepare the way for than provide 
the solution. The demand must adapt itself more 
adequately to the supply than it is now doing if 
ever the central evil of modern industry is to be 
overcome. Or, in other words, the supply must 
help to direct the demand no less than vice versa. 
The first great step on this road will come through 
the deliberate control of public work, its distribu- 
tion, acceleration and retardation, according to 
the changing conditions of the "labor market." 
Now that governments, municipalities and other 
public authorities are becoming ever greater em- 
ployers of labor, their power over the distribu- 
tion of labor is growing enormous. This gives 
them a direct means of controlling the whole labor 



1 88 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

market and thereby minimizing unemployment. 
The necessities of the transition period will prob- 
ably compel them to apply this means as never 
before, and one may hope that the new insight 
into industrial conditions which they have been 
forced to acquire during the war will enable them 
to apply it with resolution and intelligence. So a 
great beneficent experiment may be set up which 
others than public authorities will follow. 

I have said nothing of unemployment insurance 
as a remedy. It should be a last resort, and the 
more intelligence is applied in the directions al- 
ready indicated the less will it be necessary. It 
should certainly be adopted in so far as other 
measures fail to abolish genuine unemployment. 
(Here, as elsewhere, it is necessary very clearly 
to distinguish genuine unemployment from the 
"out-of-workness" of the unhappily large mass of 
the industrially disqualified, who require treatment 
of a different order altogether.) But unemploy- 
ment insurance is a confession of failure. The 
funds devoted to this palliative would in a wiser 
society be devoted to setting the recipients of in- 
surance to fruitful work. 

It is to be observed that a certain assumption 



IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 189 

has underlain the argument of these last para- 
graphs. Until quite recently all plans to abolish 
unemployment awakened the Malthusian chal- 
lenge. Your schemes are well enough, the objec- 
tor would say, if it were not for the factor of 
population. Control that if you can and dare, 
but, until you do, don't think to control unemploy- 
ment. You may absorb the existing surplus of 
labor by industrial readjustment, but the very se- 
curity you thus ensure will breed future surpluses 
to break your newly established order. Your 
Eden, he would say in the famous words of Hux- 
ley, "would have its serpent, and a very subtle 
beast, too. Man shares with the rest of the liv- 
ing world the mighty instinct of reproduction and 
its consequences, the tendency to multiply with 
great rapidity. The better the measure of the ad- 
ministrator achieved their object, the more com- 
pletely the destructive agencies of the state of 
nature were defeated, the less would that multi- 
plication be checked." Here in fact, he would 
tell us, is the real explanation of the peramnent 
surplus of labor above the demand. 

And until quite recently he would have been 
well justified in his objections. But the answer 



igo LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

has grown so convincing, is so luminous in the sta- 
tistics of the declining birth-rates of all advancing 
civilizations, that our Malthusian has retreated 
from his main position, and now talks only of par- 
ticular menaces such as spring from the relative 
"fertility" of the poor as contrasted with the well- 
to-do, and of the simpler as contrasted with the 
more cultured races, not of the general menaces of 
"over-population." Even on these remoter 
grounds he is no longer safe from attack, and may 
be assailed by other statistics which show the cor- 
relation of high birth-rate and high death-rate, as 
well as by considerations of the advance of knowl- 
edge and the percolation of habit from "upper" 
to "lower" social strata, and from advanced to 
backward people. 

The assumption chen which has underlain the 
argument is that in the more advanced countries 
the development of industrial technique and the 
exploitation of the resources of the earth is in 
our age, and clearly promises to be in future, at 
least sufficient to keep pace with the growth of 
population. This fact is of the very first impor- 
tance. If it were not a fact, all our plans to 
create a new industrial order — a better order of 



IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 191 

any kind — would be vain, for every attempt to 
check the more pernicious competition which low- 
ers the standard of life would be defeated by the 
operation of a baffling and inexorable law. The 
"principle of diminishing returns" would frustrate 
all efforts for human betterment and mock all 
visions of future progress. Those who look with 
fear on a falling birth-rate should bethink them- 
selves also of these things. They should consider 
whether this decline, apart from the incident per- 
versions which accompany every human process, 
is not the index of a new equilibrium of human 
life, which is being established as a result of its 
advance and is the very condition of any further 
advance. They should ask in the light of what- 
ever philosophy of life they are able to attain, 
whether the quality of humanity is not a supremer 
consideration than its quantity. These questions 
would indeed be easier to ask and to answer if 
once the spirit of militarism were exorcised out of 
our civilization. For it is one of the more abom- 
inable characteristics of militarism that it holds 
most in regard those quantitative properties of 
men which can be massed as mere external power, 
contemning all real values. While it rules in any 



192 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

nation, it compels all others that would worship 
truer gods to sacrifice some of these values at its 
shrine. 

There remains for consideration one source of 
over-supply which Malthus had no need to con- 
sider in that regard, but which has caused much 
doubt and questioning among ourselves. I refer 
of course to immigration. It is a subject beset 
by unusual difficulties. Here prejudice and inter- 
est combine and cross most subtly and curiously to 
warp our judgments, and the most opposite con- 
siderations unite the advocates of restriction and 
of the open door. If we confine ourselves, how- 
ever, to the direct question of the effect of immi- 
gration on labor, the main factors of the situation 
seem fairly clear. 

I believe that a carefully restrictive control of 
immigration is absolutely necessary to the estab- 
lishment of the kind of industrial order already 
suggested. Not because there is no room or fruit- 
ful work in America for all the myriads who 
annually (in normal times) pass through its gates. 
The vast resources of this continent could sustain, 
given scientific cultivation of the land, and an 
economic distribution of the people, we know not 



IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 193 

how many times its present population. And not 
because the newcomers, from Europe at any rate, 
cannot be assimilated into American life and 
raised — where raising is in question — to Ameri- 
can standards. The response to the American 
environment of the children of the foreign born, 
even of those whom we remissly suffer to be in- 
sulated in racial colonies, is a most remarkable 
phenomenon. But the true reason for restrictive 
control is an economic one. The Report of the 
Immigration Commission provides much evidence 
to show that the low-skilled occupations into which 
the mass of immigrants enter are considerably 
overstocked. Too cheap labor is, like all cheap 
things, very expensive in the long run. Our so- 
ciety as a whole, as well as those directly con- 
cerned, suffers on account of the low standards, 
the overcrowding and the infection, the disor- 
ganization and the exploitation, which are the 
other side of too cheap labor. These evils can- 
not be avoided so long as unskilled myriads are 
allowed to flood the labor market. No stand- 
ards can be maintained, no order can be built up 
in face of the competition of the immigrant-re- 



194 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

cruited reserves of unemployed. This indisput- 
able fact is the true ground for restriction. 

The literacy test recommended by the Immigra- 
tion Commission and enacted by Congress should 
prove a valuable safeguard. It affords the 
simplest, most practicable, and least invidious 
form of selection. Whether it is sufficient re- 
mains of course to be seen. But a more flexible 
method of control, working along the same lines, 
would have obvious advantages if feasible. The 
following plan is here suggested with this end in 
view: 

The whole question of employment and unem- 
ployment is so central as to call for the undivided 
consideration of a body (or a branch of the De- 
partment of Labor) specially allocated to this task. 
Such a body might be constituted as a Federal ad- 
visory council in connection with a national bureau 
of public employment offices. It would formulate 
common standards for these offices and advise on 
common policy. Maintaining close touch with 
the whole demand-and-supply situation of labor, 
it would be in an excellent position to suggest from 
time to time a public works policy in harmony with 
that situation. It would advise accordingly as 



IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 195 

to the distribution, the acceleration or the retarda- 
tion of works undertaken or projected by the Fed- 
eral Government and also by such other public 
authorities, state or local, as could be induced to 
cooperate with it. 

Would not such a body be better qualified than 
any other to say, purely in terms of the employ- 
ment situation, when and how far it was desirable 
to relax or tighten the immigration tests? The 
council would of course be able only to advise, and 
considerations other than the condition of the 
labor market might have to be weighed before 
action were taken in any particular case. But 
the paramount consideration is the condition of 
employment, as viewed by those who understand 
the prospective as well as the existing condition of 
demand and supply. The raising or lowering of 
the admission tests would not be a difficult matter. 
Literacy is a question of degree, and simple 
gradations could readily be determined, with the 
rudimentary ability to read and write as the low- 
est grade. These tests and standards, together 
with the ordinary regulations affecting immigra- 
tion, could be administered under direction of the 
consular service in Europe and elsewhere, and thus 



ig6 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

the hardships, delays and disappointments of re- 
jection and deportation on this side would be 
avoided. A consular certificate would be the neces- 
sary and sufficient permit of the intending immi- 
grant. 

There are of course real difficulties involved 
in this plan, but we must bear in mind that we are 
dealing with an extremely difficult problem. The 
present time offers a most favorable opportunity 
for judicious experimentation while the check 
which the war and its aftermath have given to 
immigration lasts. Finally, any general policy of 
immigration should, if possible, be one concerted 
between the United States and Canada, on account 
of their common interest in the matter and of the 
frontier difficulties and evasions arising from a 
discrepancy of standards. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE LABOR OF WOMEN 

The position of women in industry. The squat 
pyramid. The influence of the war on the 
sphere of women's work. The unequal com- 
petition of men and women. The dilemma of 
"equal pay for equal work" Is there a way 
out? 

The famous declaration that a country cannot 
endure half servile and half free may be directed 
with peculiar force to the present relationship of 
men and women in industry. Unless the woman 
worker too is emancipated, the emancipation of 
the man worker must always be hazardous and in- 
complete. This is not the ultimate reason why 
society should be concerned over the industrial 
status of women, but it is that which is most likely 
to appeal to those men workers whose too narrow 
but quite natural fears have led them to oppose, 
in the case of women, the claims on which they 

have been most insistent for themselves. 

197 



198 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

The lot of women in industry is, without quali- 
fication, the most damning indictment of our pres- 
ent system. Consider for a moment the general 
character it presents. As an economic structure, 
the work of women in industry, before the period 
of the war, might be likened to a broad-based and 
very squat pyramid. The lowest tier would in- 
clude the multitudes of women in the "sweated in- 
dustries," seamstresses, tailoresses, dressmakers, 
lacemakers, flo,wermakers, boxmakers, and all 
others engaged in that dismal survival of the old 
in the new, the home finishing of factory goods; 
with these must also be grouped many of the 
workers in uncontrolled semi-domestic factories, 
as for example in small canneries, bakeshops, and 
laundries — all these subject, between the intervals 
of unemployment, to excessive hours of labor and 
to conditions that undermine the health of body 
and spirit. And by this labor, patient and persistent 
beyond the labor of the scripturally commended 
ant, they earn so poor a pittance that great num- 
bers of them are permanently underfed, perma- 
nently deprived of the comforts and decencies 
of life. Arising out of that level, by fine grada- 
tions, come the ranks of women who feed and 



THE LABOR OF WOMEN 199 

tend machines, drudge labor badly paid; and 
with these the majority of salesgirls in stores. 
From that level there emerge the office-workers, 
stenographers and secretaries; and above these, in 
rapidly diminishing numbers towards the apex of 
the pyramid, the women managers and entrepre- 
neurs, the "business women" of modern days. 

The youth of the nation's womanhood, in ever- 
increasing multitudes, is thrust by economic forces 
into the lowest tiers of this squat pyramid, with in 
general no industrial training, no guidance, no 
fit preparation in general education, no prospect 
but that of escape by marriage. Before the war 
nearly half the women workers of America were 
under 25 years of age, and of those over 15 years 
of age 80 per cent (according to the evidence of 
the U. S. Census Bureau, 1905) received less than 
what might have been roughly regarded as an 
average subsistence-rate, i. e. $8 per week. 

It is clear that here we have a situation deserv- 
ing most earnest consideration, if by any means 
the womankind of our civilization can be rescued 
from the drift of those social-economic forces 
which have brought about this result. Nowhere 
is the need of persistent industrial rebuilding 



200 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

greater than here. Before we discuss it, however, 
we must observe the significant changes occasioned 
by the war, the further great influx of women into 
wage-earning work, the direct replacement of men 
by women, and the entry of women into occupa- 
tions hitherto monopolized by men. 

The process may be seen more clearly under 
European conditions, where the pressure and the 
displacement have been greater in proportion than 
in America. Thus in the United Kingdom, by 
January, 191 8, the number of women and girls in 
industrial occupations had increased, as compared 
with July, 1914, from 2,175,500^ 2,708,500, and 
in other occupations (commercial, agricultural, 
transport, professional, and governmental) from 
1,099,500 to 2,042,500, making a total increase of 
44 per cent. The same authority (the British 
Labor Gazette) places at 1,442,000 the instances 
in which women have directly replaced men. In 
the earlier period of the war the influx of women 
was mainly into the unskilled occupations in which 
they had previously been engaged, but the pressure 
of military demands gradually broke through the 
barriers of convention prejudice, and both real and 
unreal sex-distinction which had made certain oc- 



THE LABOR OF WOMEN 201 

cupations, such as those of bank-clerk, ticket-col- 
lector, conductor, chauffeur, switch-tender, and 
many others, predominantly or entirely a male pre- 
serve. 

These changes, which have occurred to a greater 
or less extent in all belligerent countries, make 
more imperative the settlement of an old industrial 
problem, the relation of women to men in economic 
life. The pre-war position was most unsatisfac- 
tory. Here, as elsewhere, the civilized world 
had allowed itself to become the victim of its own 
technological advance. There was perhaps never 
a time when the working spheres of men and 
women were quite distinct — Eve delved as well as 
span — but there was certainly a time, before the 
days of wagery and machinery, when the unequal 
competition of women and men was unknown. 
The industrial revolution put an end to that, and 
its later developments, breaking ever more com- 
pletely the system of apprenticeship and the de- 
marcation of crafts, fostered a very direct an- 
tagonism between the interests of men and of 
women in industry. Economic necessity drove 
women into industry, but under conditions which 
ensured that, wherever they entered in numbers, 



202 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

the rate of wages fell below subsistence level. 
(Even in occupations where men retained their 
"monopoly," the fact that their womenfolk en- 
tered into industry, and thus contributed to the 
family wage, lowered their competitive limit and 
probably tended to reduce their wages. This 
conclusion is suggested at any rate by the lower 
level of men's wages in "textile" towns, where 
nearly all the adult members of working families 
are engaged in industrial work, as compared with 
the rates in the "steel" towns, where the men form 
the majority of workers.) It was thus inevitable 
that men should jealously guard from their in- 
vasion whatever preserves they could. But, as 
the workers have so often found, the industrial 
process is too powerful to be stayed by conven- 
tions, and the war has merely hastened an inevit- 
able evolution. No restoration of old privileges 
is likely to avail; no general withdrawal of women 
from the newly occupied territory is probable — - 
or even desirable. Another way out has to be 
found. 

The root of the trouble is of course the social- 
economic distinction between the man and the 
woman, the different relationship to the family 






THE LABOR OF WOMEN 203 

unit which makes it possible for women, in spite of 
various real handicaps of sex, to underbid men. 
It is a peculiarly ironic situation, since it was his 
sex-advantage, from the economic point of view, 
which placed on man's shoulders the economic bur- 
den of the family, thus enabling the woman, in 
the turn of circumstance, so to outbid his labor as 
to imperil the basis of their common welfare. 

So little has been done to meet this situation, 
so closely is it bound up with those sex prejudices 
which still tangle our civilization, that only a first 
approach to the solution of the problem seems 
possible to-day, What is in the first place most 
necessary and most feasible is the organization of 
women workers. Most feasible, but still very 
difficult, in view of their own apathy, of their gen- 
eral transitoriness in industry, of the obstacles put 
in the way not merely by employers but often by 
male workers, and of the never-exhausted reserves 
of employable women. Nevertheless, such re- 
markable and fruitful examples of organization 
among women as have been achieved in the cot- 
ton industry of Lancashire and in the garment- 
making industry of New York, Chicago, and other 
cities, offer grounds for hope. It is also significant 



20 4 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

that some unions formerly limited to men have 
opened their ranks to women and are furthering 
their organization. The activity of the Women's 
Trade Union Leagues of Great Britain and of the 
United States respectively and of the British Na- 
tional Federation of Women Workers has met 
with a certain degree of success. What is most 
obvious to all who have been in contact with this 
work is the need for persistent education, a task 
in which the male trade unionists, in the interest 
of themselves as well as in that of the women 
workers, should take the greatest share. 

The phrase "equal pay for equal work" is often 
taken as pointing the goal to be sought in the re- 
lation of men and women in industry. But the 
phrase, we ought clearly to realize, represents an 
ideal still far distant, and one which, like some 
other phrases expressing a common standard for 
men and women, is by no means self-explanatory. 
If all industry were on a piece-work basis, the ap- 
plication would be simpler. But the real differ- 
ences of strength, aptitude, and endurance, be- 
tween men and women make its application to 
time-work a matter of great difficulty. Here the 
actual differences in economic efficiency, varying 



THE LABOR OF WOMEN 205 

as they do for different types of work in ways 
which only experience reveals, must first be de- 
termined, and this should be the work of a joint 
committee in each case, comprising, besides repre- 
sentatives of the management, both women and 
men workers. For that large group of occupa- 
tions wherein the majority of workers are women 
receiving below-subsistence wages, the only prac- 
ticable method at present seems to be the estab- 
lishment of Trade Boards, on the lines initiated 
by the British Act of 1909, or of Minimum Wage 
Boards, as adopted in principle by the legislation 
of over a dozen American States and of a few 
Canadian Provinces. 

All this is of course but a fragment of that 
greater organization which is needed to assure the 
emancipation of women from their present eco- 
nomic dependence and of men from its direct and 
indirect reactions upon themselves. 

For to reorganize the industrial position of 
women on the lines just indicated, working to- 
wards the attainment of virtual equality of re- 
turn for equality of service, is to accept one horn 
of an old dilemma, not to remove it. The dilem- 
ma is simply this: if women receive unequal pay 



206 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

for equal work, it is unfair and injurious to them- 
selves, and at the same time it creates a type of 
competition which is unfair and injurious to men; 
if on the other hand women receive equal pay for 
equal work, is that, too, not unfair and injurious 
to men who, as family "bread-winners," still bear 
the heavier burden? If taxation is considered 
fair when it is graduated in accordance with the 
economic capacities of the payer, why not wage- 
rates graduated in accordance with the economic 
burdens of the payee? Would not the very rem- 
edy proposed against unfair competition, equality 
of pay, operate to produce another and perhaps 
more fatal inequality? And is not the disparity 
of burden in question, establishing as it does dif- 
ferential limits of competition for men and for 
women respectively, one of the causes which 
naturally produced the difference of rate? If 
you abolish the difference, stemming competition 
by decreeing equality of rates, what guarantee is 
there that this equality is consistent with the neces- 
sary level set as a minimum for the family bread- 
winner? 

The dilemma is real and not to be evaded. By 
itself the alternative for which we have argued 



THE LABOR OF WOMEN 207 

is no complete solution of our problem. So. far as 
that can be found, it must be sought through the 
development of the general economic independence 
of women, not merely of their equality in wage- 
earning. Here is a momentous enterprise that 
civilization may some day undertake. It involves, 
in especial, such a reorganization of society that 
the task of raising children is itself accounted 
an economic service (being also of course in- 
finitely more) and not a cause of dependency. It 
is the partial independence, economically, of 
women which has created this fateful dilemma: 
independence as receiving wages at all, partial as 
receiving them on a different scale and only for 
such service as lies without the peculiar function 
of women. At one time all forms of work fell 
within the wageless "household duties" of women 
— then there was no dilemma. This arose with 
the displacement of home work which was a part 
of what we call the Industrial Revolution. When 
women followed their work to its new locus in fac- 
tory or store, they broke, all unintentionally at 
first, the circle of dependent domesticity. The 
process goes on. Not only is the displacement of 
home work proceeding as restaurant and bakeshop 



208 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

and laundry cater to needs once supplied within 
the household, but there is besides a tendency to 
the division of labor in household work itself, so 
that wage-earners are being specialized to do the 
cleaning and mending as well as the plumbing and 
decorating. It may well be that some day only 
the crowning occupation of motherhood will re- 
main, so far as the majority of women are con- 
cerned, outside the sphere of service which has a 
direct economic valuation. If the suggestion that 
the service of motherhood should also be included 
within that sphere seems like sacrilege to some, 
it is because of a false and itself degrading theory 
of the dependence of other forms of service on 
the economic return which they bring. It in no 
way lessens the dignity or quality or social in- 
commensurability of the service rendered by, say, 
the statesman or, if you like, the priest that he 
finds in his work the means of his support. At 
present the most vital form of home service is an 
alternative to wage-earning, and one result is, in 
many cases, a disastrous dilemma. Many mar- 
ried women — and not these alone — have to-day to 
choose between home-duty and wage-earning, and 
both themselves and their society must suffer 



THE LABOR OF WOMEN 209 

whichever of these bitter alternatives they choose. 
It is this truth which has led, in particular, to 
schemes and systems of "mothers' allowances" or 
"pensions," as a further step along the road lead- 
ing to economic independence in return for service. 
But this theme lies beyond the scope of our pres- 
ent subject, beyond the compass of mere present- 
day industrial reorganization. It must therefore 
suffice to state the conviction that age-old social 
forces, initiated long before the existing indus- 
trial order was constituted, though particularly 
active in our own times, are working towards the 
consummation of that equality in difference of the 
sexes which will bring, as one of its fruits, the 
restoration of their economic harmony. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 

Reconstruction, not restoration. The three great 
industrial problems of the day. One way of 
solution for all three. Big industry and big 
ideas. "More light — but also more warmth! 9 
Education, scientific and social. True and 
false applications of science to industry. The 
shortcomings of the Taylor plan. Experi- 
ments in the garment industry. The need for 
social education. The end behind the means. 
Labor as also deliverer. 

I 

It is a sound instinct that has prompted the 
vogue of the word "reconstruction" in these days. 
It is reconstruction, not restoration, that should 
follow the war. Return is now impossible, across 
the chasm of war, to the conditions that preceded 
it. Return, were it possible, would in any case 
be undesirable. Those who advocate it convict 
themselves of the most fatal of inabilities, the 
inability to profit by experience. Experience 

2IO 



THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 211 

teaches fools, runs the proverb: on the contrary, 
the fools are just those whom experience does not 
teach. 

There are three great industrial problems that 
now the war is ended demand our most earnest 
thought, one of a temporary and two of a perma- 
nent nature: 

( 1 ) How to absorb in the ordinary industries 
of peace, with as little dislocation and discontent 
as possible, the soldiers who have returned and the 
workers who have been engaged on war work; 

(2) How to remove the disintegrating con- 
flict between labor and capital which was grow- 
ing more and more bitter before the war; 

(3) How to increase the efficiency and pro- 
ductivity of industry, not only in order to make 
good the material ravages of war, but to provide 
those material resources on which — though not on 
them alone — depend the removal of the existing 
mass of poverty and the provision of that oppor- 
tunity and leisure without which life remains 
tragically unfulfilled. 

These are tremendous problems. Taken to- 
gether, they may well seem overwhelming. If 
each had to find a separate solution, we might 



2ia LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

well despair of the issue. But I hold that the 
same solution can and must be found for all the 
three. First let us face the surely obvious fact 
that needs so great and so urgent cannot be met 
without a drastic revision of the whole industrial 
order. If we are not prepared for that we must 
admit the alternative of drift and chaos. The 
other alternative means the substitution of or- 
ganized cooperation for industrial conflict and 
disorganization. Some of the applications of this 
principle we have already discussed — a few out of 
many. What these and other reforms can ac- 
complish is, simply, the broadening of the common 
interest. This involves, let us face it frankly, 
the elimination of the mere wage-earner on the 
one hand and consequently of the mere capitalist 
on the other. The interests of these are inevit- 
ably opposed. The opposing interests, if indeed 
there is to be advance at all, must somehow be har- 
monized, be assimilated. 

This fact is being recognized by the more far- 
sighted employers of labor. Thus Lord Lever- 
hulme has said: "It is not only that the wage- 
system, by precluding from a share of the fruits 
of industry, is manifestly unfair, but it is also 



THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 213 

apparent even to the least thoughtful that the 
wage-system dulls and deadens the keenness of 
even the best and most conscientious workers, and 
produces a mob of *ca' canny' shirkers and slack- 
ers. 

If this be true, what condemnation could be 
more great? If it be true, is it not worth some 
risk, some enterprise, some thought, some sacri- 
fice, to establish a better system which will re- 
place one so detrimental to human worth as well 
as to material prosperity? And if that is possible 
at all, it must be possible now, when the iron of 
our customs has become malleable in the fire of 
war. 

It is the day of big things. We have witnessed 
the biggest armed conflict of all history: we shall 
miss its monstrous meaning unless we perceive it 
as the clash of forces which our civilization had 
engendered but was impotent to control. In the 
face of the big forces, both material and spiritual, 
which our age has brought to birth we have stood 
like children possessed of a new engine whose 
powers attract and frighten them — or like the 
magi of medieval story who raise a spirit so 
mighty that they shrink back from its manifesta- 



214 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

tion. In industry, as elsewhere, bigness rules. 
Economic forces unite and divide mankind over 
all the earth, here bringing them together in one 
vast network of production and exchange, there^ 
in the apportionment of the spoils, cutting great 
lines of cleavage between them. It is the day of 
big things, but our ideas have been too narrow for 
them. We have misunderstood bigness while we 
admired and followed it. We have thought in 
terms of size, of mere aggregation; of force, of 
mere cumulation. But bigness is more than these. 
Where it exists there must be a big order, too — 
or else the overgrown mass collapses of its own 
mere weight. 

Big industry demands big purpose. Big indus- 
try has big problems, but it is thereby freed from 
little problems. Small-scale business in a grow- 
ing world is hand-to-mouth business, hazardously 
competitive, unstable. No wide policy is here 
possible, no statesmanship, no foundation of gen- 
erous and secure relationship. Small business 
must seek every immediate advantage, the profit 
of the moment, lest another snatch it away. Life 
becomes a struggle with little mercy, and the 
worker in particular is never freed from grinding 



THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 215 

exactions, the operation of the "iron law" which 
pulls his wages to the subsistence level. Large- 
scale business, in relation with the social and 
economic conditions on which it depends, makes 
possible a wider view, a more constructive policy. 
By breaking the immediate insistence of the com- 
petitive struggle it makes possible, could men only 
shake off the habits of the passing age, the de* 
liberate foundation of a more harmonious and en- 
during order. 

So men may come to build what, in comparison 
with the present, may well be called the "great 
society" — not merely the great State, but that 
manifold life of coordinated and yet spontaneous 
activities which, instead of being dominated and 
in part repressed by a State devoted to the pur- 
suit of power, will find in the State one of its 
essential organs. 

To many such a project will appear the Uto- 
pian dream of a new heaven and a new earth. 
But every act of every man's life is a record of 
his belief that the world can be changed for the 
better — so far as he is concerned — and if his 
action be a cooperative one, so far as that circle 
can extend. Anyhow, it has now been made 



216 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

abundantly clear that men can make themselves a 
new hell, which very fact may perhaps inspire 
them to enhance their estimate of the possibility 
of making a new heaven. In the order of social 
causality there are upward and downward spirals. 
Thus, in the labor field for instance, low efficiency 
means low wages, which means low living stand- 
ards, which react again on efficiency and on wages; 
high efficiency permits high wages, which in turn 
make possible leisure and education, which make 
possible higher efficiency, which makes possible 
higher wages, and so on. Of course these spirals 
of causality may be crossed and broken by social 
forces of another kind. But they are nevertheless 
real and most significant, and they justify at once 
the hopes and the efforts of those who believe in 
"reconstruction." 

II 

We have been concerned in these chapters 
mainly with questions of organization. But or- 
ganization is the embodiment of a spirit, and re* 
organization requires in the first place a new spirit. 
Science, though most needful, will not alone secure 
the desired end. In the language of the British 






THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 217 

Labor Manifesto there is needed "more light — 
but also more warmth." Science (in the nar- 
rower sense of the term) must be supplemented 
by fellowship. Only when these two link forces 
can the battle be on. 

We need, more than anything else, education. 
All else depends upon that. We need a great de- 
velopment of both technical and social education; 
and the more attention we devote to the one the 
more should we devote to the other. It is, quite 
strictly, impossible to spend too much on education, 
which is the soul of the progress of men and of na- 
tions. Technical education is the source of power, 
social education the source of understanding; and 
power together with understanding has led man- 
kind thus far on its untraveled road. It is a happy 
sign that governments and peoples are awakening 
to the immense value of scientific research and be- 
ginning to make some proper provision for it, in- 
stead of, as so often hitherto, regarding it as an 
amiable luxury to be pursued by aid of such meager 
resources as devoted scientists could muster. One 
discovery of science may serve mankind better than 
an age of unenlightened toil. But science is not 



218 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

enough. As the war has shown, it can either 
destroy or fulfill. 

It is when we come to the relationship of man 
to man that this objective science proves inade- 
quate. This may be illustrated by the fate of the 
Taylor plan of "scientific management." Taylor 
himself was particularly concerned with one kind 
of industrial waste, that due to the maladjustment 
of worker to work in the sphere of heavy un- 
skilled labor. He wrote a famous little book to 
demonstrate how the application of the simplest 
scientific principles would save the worker from 
overexertion and fatigue, and at the same time 
effect a marvelous increase in his productivity. 
The demonstration seemed complete. "Scientific 
management" was acclaimed by many as a new 
stage of the Industrial Revolution. Further ap- 
plications of the principle were developed by Tay- 
lor and his followers, such as Emerson and Gantt. 
But the workers showed a particular hostility to 
this method of saving them from strain and fa- 
tigue, which disconcerted Taylor very much. It 
was something more than the usual instinctive 
fear of unemployment through efficiency. It was 
also the not unjustified fear of economic degrada- 



THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 219 

tion, of the loss of initiative, and of the destruc- 
tion of those safeguards which they had painfully 
built against internecine competition. Taylor had 
thought and planned too much as if the worker 
were merely a means to production, as if he were 
to be treated like a machine, an automaton, a will- 
less subject for stop-watch experimentation. His 
not to reason why; his to bend his back when he 
was told, to rest when he was told, to start again 
when he was told. And the worker, so strangely 
objecting, spoiled many a promising experiment. 
Fundamentally, it was not that he preferred over- 
exertion and fatigue ; it was not that he preferred 
to be less productive ; it was that, like the rest of 
us, he was a human being first. 

Yet the heart of Taylor's idea was sound. Inef- 
ficiency is always evil, defeating our purposes, and 
science is always right. What was wrong in Tay- 
lor's scheme was, in a sense, that it was not scien- 
tific enough. He did not realize how efficiency de- 
pends on cooperation, and cooperation on common 
interest. His science was inadequate because it 
left out of account the most important factor of 
all. His plan was no remedy against the condi- 
tions which breed listlessness and slacking. It 



220 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

contained no answer, for example, to the unhappily 
common argument, "What's the use? If we drive 
too many rivets to-day, to-morrow we'll get hell 
for letting up." On the contrary, it was calculated 
to foster that spirit, by still further reducing the 
interest of the worker in his work. It was not 
scientific enough, because it ignored psychology. 
It is there that the science of autocracy always 
fails. 

Inefficiency is always evil. There can be no 
general gain from deliberate limitation of output, 
whether adopted by labor with a view to prolong- 
ing employment, or by capital with a view to in- 
creasing profits. u What the nation needs," says 
the British labor manifesto already quoted, "is 
undoubtedly a great bound onward in its aggregate 
productivity." That is a necessary condition of 
our release from the heavy burden of poverty. 

What then is the solution? It is instructive to 
compare Taylor's method of applying science with 
another which not long ago was adopted in that 
home of significant experimentation, the dress and 
waist industry of New York City. Here too 
science has been invoked to redeem the loss due to 
the ordinary haphazard methods of working. This 



THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 221 

is being achieved, however, not through the fiat 
of the management but by a joint board of em- 
ployers and workers, with in addition some repre- 
sentatives of the public. Employers and workers 
have in fact cooperated to investigate the best con- 
ditions of work, to make a real scientific study 
of the nature of the materials and the skill of 
the operators in their relation, to the various 
results desired. The workers entered whole- 
heartedly into this scheme of "work-analysis," as 
being their own plan also, and they in fact share 
in the expense as well as in the deliberation it 
involves. It promises consequences of far-reach- 
ing importance, an efficiency and a productivity 
beneficial to all concerned. And it is more, not 
less, scientific than the Taylor plan, because it takes 
into consideration the psychology of the workeF 
as well as the technology of the work. Partial 
and limited as it is, it does suggest the union of 
science and fellowship. It is at least an attempt to 
reconcile these two factors which must somehow 
be reconciled, self-government and science, the one 
the condition and the other the means of the 
realization of all for which men live. 

I have not cited this case as revealing any com- 



222 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

plete solution of the problem of industrial rela- 
tions. It is far from that, but it is nevertheless 
one of those experiments which reveal a step far- 
ther on the road. The goal of science joined to 
fellowship is still far ahead — a thousand obstacles 
of self-interest, ignorance, and misunderstanding 
lie between — but every step that brings it nearer 
makes more clear that vision of the goal without 
which nothing can be attained at all. 

Science provides the means, but we badly need 
enlightenment as to the ends they serve. Science 
shows the road to productivity, but productivity 
for what? If by our social indifference and lack 
of direction we increase productivity by means 
which wear or degrade the producer, what good 
is that to society? If productivity is increased 
by the labor of children, thus debarred from edu- 
cation and subject to toil that rubs the bloom off 
youth, does the country gain or lose? What good 
is it, at that price, to sell, let us say, more textiles 
in the South American market? Productivity is 
essential, but it must not be at the cost of the 
producer. Productivity is justified only by the 
welfare it makes actual. It is no idol to be 
worshiped nor any justification of those specious 



THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 223 

arguments which bid us acquiesce in evil condi- 
tions for its sake, arguments which are cal- 
culated to support our mental inertia and to main- 
tain our mental comfort undisturbed. This is in- 
deed the ugliest thing in human nature, that men 
can come to value their comfort and serenity about 
the life and happiness of multitudes. 

Against this the only hope lies in social educa- 
tion; education in the character and needs of our 
society and in the real conditions on which its 
greatness depends; education which makes plain 
the end behind the means, the idea and the forms 
of social welfare to which all economic activity 
should be subservient; education which, in short, 
can help men to live together as well as to work 
together. For no more in living well than in 
working well do our unguided instincts serve. 

Education may not engender the spirit of hu- 
manity, but it directs it, justifies it, and thereby 
stimulates it. Education shows the economy of 
cooperation. It discovers connection and mutual 
dependence in what seemed unrelated. It alone 
can destroy the basis in ignorance on which the 
whole spirit of caste, which denies likeness and 



224 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

draws apart from that of which it is a part, is 
founded. 

If this avails not, nothing avails. You may 
deny the old definition of man, which distinguished 
him as the rational among animals. On the con- 
trary, you may say, a bundle of prejudices and 
habits, affinities and antipathies (which is merely 
to insist that he is animal as well as rational). 
But you cannot deny that he is, if not always 
rational, still always reasoning, for he makes his 
prejudices the grounds of his too simple conclu- 
sions. The most irrational types, as, for example, 
the jingo militarist, are often the most rigorous 
in their logic. Now the prejudices of men de- 
pend on their environment present and past, on 
their social conditions, largely on their education. 
And no one denies that these may be in a measure 
changed. This is, in a word, the case for social 
education. The knowledge of the actual condi- 
tions under which men live, of the causes and con- 
sequences of their modes of life and of work, of 
the ways in which institutions advance or retard 
their ends — this, most imperfect as it is, consti- 
tutes the best means available for dispelling prej- 



THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 225 

udices and so helping to convert reasoning into 
rational creatures. 

Labor may thus, in seeking deliverance, prove 
also a deliverer. The "labor movement" in the 
world of to-day, in so far as it insistently brings 
to our attention the maladjustments of our social 
order, is helping, and if wisely directed can help 
still more, to break that bondage of custom and 
complacency which robs ideals of their power. 



CHAPTER XIV 

SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS 

If the argument set out in the preceding pages 
holds, there are certain large policies which need 
to be carried into effect that the great cleavage of 
labor and capital may be narrowed to a normal 
conflict of orderly social forces, instead of being 
widened into the gulf of anarchy. These may be 
summarized as: 

I. The establishment of specific minima and 
maxima to ensure a basic standard of well- 
being, and 

II. The assurance to the worker of his so- 
cial position as finally not a cost of but a part- 
ner in production. 

The minima and maxima referred to in I would 

include : 

(a) maximum hours of work for every class 

of worker in every industry (subject, of 

course, to special arrangements for voluntary 

overtime under certain circumstances) ; 
226 



SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS 227 

(b) minimum wage-rates for unskilled and 
unorganized labor based on the principle 
that no one who serves the community shall 
receive for that service less than suffices to 
ensure for him or her the material conditions 
of healthy living; 

(c) minimum wage-rates for every grade 
and kind of worker above the classes included 
under (b), determined periodically by joint 
agreement of all parties directly concerned, 
it being stipulated, as a necessary condition, 
that all shall have free access to every form 
of technical and occupational training and 
thereby free entrance into any skilled trade; 

(d) minimum age regulations so as to pre- 
vent the exploitation of children and young 
persons in industry, and to ensure the proper 
education of all young persons; 

(e) minimum requirements in each industry 
to ensure the protection of the worker, male 
and female, against all avoidable fatigue, ac- 
cident, ill-health, poisoning and disease; to- 
gether with insurance against the economic 
consequences of these evils. 



228 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

Certain of these conditions can best be secured 
by international agreement. The wider the area 
over which uniformity in respect to minimal re- 
quirements is attained, the better. Others are or 
can be attained by independent legislative enact- 
ment. But in nearly all cases such measures find 
their strongest and best support in the organiza- 
tion of the industries concerned as, within limits 
prescribed by the State, self-determining bodies. 

The minima referred to under (b) and (c) 
are particularly hard to apply, and the develop- 
ment of the principles involved will call for a 
special subdivision of economic science. An 
initial difficulty often raised may here be briefly 
dismissed, viz. that a rise of wages means a rise 
of prices, and so merely creates a vicious circle at 
the end of which the worker is no better off than 
before. This prima^facie view ignores the rela- 
tion between prices and the currency-basis. The 
employer who resists the demand for higher wages 
knows better. In general it is not possible to 
raise prices at will. No more is it possible to raise 
wages at will, but only where the industry does or 
can produce a surplus, a further portion of which 
can be diverted to wages. (But the minimum 



SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS 229 

wage should in every case be regarded as a first 
lien on industry. Unless it can support that, it is 
insolvent and an encumbrance to the general in- 
dustrial life.) Under conditions of monopoly or 
quasi-monopoly the control of prices by capital 
may be such as to create the vicious circle alluded 
to : and under these conditions special regulations 
are necessary, nationalization being always possi- 
ble as a last resort 

The assurances referred to in II must insure 
the principle that labor is, from the social stand- 
point, not a cost of but a partner in production, 
and the following conditions are necessary: 

(a) Security against unemployment and in 
the last resort, wherever that proves impos- 
sible, security (through insurance) against 
the consequences of unemployment; 

(b) Security against arbitrary dismissal, un- 
fair treatment, and exploitation of any kind. 

These assurances, however, cannot be attained, 
nor in any case would they suffice, without a fur- 
ther provision of the first importance, viz. that 
the organizations of the workers, where they 
exist, be brought into direct relation to the manage- 



2 3 o LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 

ment, being fully informed of the condition and 
progress of the industry in the particular work- 
shop and in general, and that the workers, in so 
far as organized, be admitted to any council which 
has to do with determining the conditions of their 
work. 

A complementary condition is the recognition, 
on the part of labor, that all organization creates 
in some sense a monopoly, and that therefore, if 
it receives these assurances against capitalistic 
monopoly, the community is in turn entitled to a 
still wider assurance, viz. that it shall have, 
through freely constituted government, the final 
voice, when that becomes necessary, in the co- 
ordination of all the conflicting interests within it. 
If labor is given these assurances that its own 
special needs shall not be over-ridden, it must in 
turn offer assurances that it shall not, in pursuit of 
its own interests, disregard or break its obliga- 
tions under law to the community at large. The 
establishment of special industrial courts, advo- 
cated in c. VII, would make vastly easier this co- 
ordination of interests. 



